Chapter 17
Five and a half weeks until Opening Night
Sometimes I wonder if I really have a passion for theater, or if it’s just habit.
I was raised in rehearsals, watching my parents’ work.
I did my homework backstage and was brought up by theater people.
I don’t mean my parents; their general attitude to me was similar to that of a structural column onstage that can’t be moved so must be worked around.
I think they had a child because it seemed like a thing people should do, except that they didn’t know what a child even was.
I was outsourced to kindly costume ladies who taught me how to do simple mending, or patient stage managers who let me sit beside them, coloring, or later, when I could read, following the scripts for line prompts.
On summer break, they never sent me to camp or day care.
“There’s no better education than the theater!” my mother announced.
“But it’s summer,” I’d whine. “I already was educated all year!”
“That sentence structure suggests otherwise,” my father would pipe in and then return to his script.
Summer, at least, had musicals, with the high school kids who I thought were so cool.
I would follow the choreographer around and stand in the back of the dance studio, and by the end of the summer, they always moved me to the front for the other kids to watch.
It wasn’t that I was an especially good dancer—I lacked everything that makes a dancer watchable in terms of fire and grace—but I had a meticulous memory for detail.
I could see that dance, not just my own body following movements, but I could envision it as if from above.
I knew innately how all the bodies needed to move in space.
I could see the big picture. I guess Jess, the choreographer, commented on it to my parents because at dinner one day they asked me if I wanted to take dance classes.
“I had hoped your tastes ran more classical, but I suppose a background in musical theater never hurt anyone,” my father said with the bland disappointment of a former college football player with a passionate badminton player for a child.
“I don’t want to,” I said. “Thank you.” It was so rare that my parents took real interest in me, I didn’t want to take it for granted.
“Ballet is classical,” my mother said.
“I like helping Jess. But I don’t think dance is actually my thing.”
“You’re an actor,” my mother said, apropos of nothing, since so far, I had only done two very mediocre school plays. “You need to focus on your craft.”
I was eight.
Rehearsals have entered full swing. Nick continues to be an idiot, but many people are still completely charmed by him.
I keep thinking about Will, wishing it were him instead, grateful that it isn’t too.
Whatever Will is, he is best kept at a distance.
Whatever that was between us is too big, too much for me to possibly deal with.
I can’t let another man ruin me. I have a job to do here. I need to focus.
Nick has dialed down the Shakespeare voice, still doesn’t understand the difference between upstage and downstage, and whispers things backstage that he hopes will win me back.
I pretend that his voice in my ear doesn’t send my whole body into an old shiver of pleasure.
But aside from that, we are all finding our groove.
The whole time we were together, Nick would introduce me as his “date,” which was sometimes funny if we were at a work event where everyone knew me already.
It was acceptable in public for a while, but then we were closing in on four months, five months, and I was spending several nights a week at his condo.
We were more and more in each other’s lives, and it grated on me.
The whole time we were together, he insisted that he wasn’t cut out for anything serious, that he could never fully commit, which was fine with me, because like all women, I believed that this wouldn’t apply to me, that I would break the cycle.
I knew the rules, and I caught feelings anyway. Tale as old as time.
It wasn’t totally my fault. We would be lying in the bath together, veins thick with my favorite wine that he’d brought, and he would wash my hair so gently, kiss my temples, and say, “Dammit, Mira, maybe we could really be something? I can half see it, you and me, in LA, tearing up the town, going to galas . . . getting out of fucking Toronto and just really going for it.”
He didn’t say these things to me so much as near me, within earshot, but I drank them up. They were just further confirmation that I would be the one to break through.
To what end, though? I knew deep down that he was an idiot, that he never remembered people’s names even though he’d worked with them for three years.
He never ever had oat milk for my coffee at his place because he drank his black, even though I spent several mornings a week there.
I knew that he was talented in the way that is entertaining.
He was grandiose, cocky in a way that was appealing on-screen.
People love a despicable lead. But I also knew that he gave zero thought to what he was doing, that as soon as someone called “cut,” he had no reverence for the work.
He had done it, so it was good. Whereas I would play a take over and over in my head, re-blocking it, rewriting scenes in my head that I knew were half-assed, because they had been written on a napkin twenty minutes before we shot them.
Nick, in all capacities, was blissfully unbothered.
And when the next chance came for him to go to LA, he didn’t actually want me there.
Which is why I am surprised that he is actually doing this play.
I thought he would bail. I thought he would be a caricature of himself and bumble off into the sunset after the first two weeks.
He’s not particularly good. I’ll give him this: He has found his genre, as my father would say, which is that he plays the role like he’s in an action movie, stomping around and pushing Lysander and being sexually threatening to Helena.
And sure, that’s all there in the script.
He is just completely without nuance or depth.
I’m surprised that he seems to genuinely want me; he is trying to be sweet to me, opening doors and offering to run lines with me.
As if I need his help. There is still a physical pull to him, but it’s funny: Being here, in a different place with different people around us, I am somehow blessedly immune to him.
I know what a disaster he is for me. Funny, that he and Will are both so different, yet both so differently dangerous.
Nick has taken to doing little speeches before rehearsal, which infuriates my father but seems to have a rallying effect on the rest of the cast and crew.
It’s as close to a football coach as possible, with some name-droppy anecdotes about Hollywood, life as a TV star, all the stuff that the locals eat up.
At rehearsal he is never alone; he is always swarmed by fans, who are now daring to consider themselves friends with him, and I know that this is his investment, so people will say, Nick Nolan was just the best guy, so down-to-earth, so funny, so jacked, so handsome.
That is the oxygen Nick Nolan survives on.
This is why the man has no need of real relationships.
His superficial ones give him so much. He has also made a regular joke out of whistling backstage, because it gets such a rise out of everyone.
He takes it all a step further in today’s opening remarks. “Folks, you have made me feel so welcome here, and I’m just loving being a part of your community. We have all been working really hard on this show, and I’m really proud of us.”
Someone starts to clap in the back. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s it, that’s right!” A few more join in, and suddenly he has the frenetic energy of a youth pastor.
He pulses his hands: Calm down. “So I was thinking you all might like to join me at my cottage for a little social gathering this weekend, some beers, barbecue, campfire.” He is pandering so hard.
Beers? The man only drinks red wine over sixty dollars as a personal rule.
“All are welcome, bring your sweetheart.” Jesus, he is fully invested in this down-home local-boy thing.
“I’ve got everything else covered. Hope to see you there!
” He pauses dramatically. “Oh, and friends, it’s a costume party!
Theme is Shakes-peah!” Now there is wild applause, a few people looking at each other wild-eyed that they have a personal invitation to enter the big star’s domain.
He bows dramatically, catching my eye. I look away.
“Okay, now let’s get onstage and give it a hundred and ten percent!
” He fist-pumps and the group cheers and disperses.
“Oh, hello, I did want to discuss some of the merging themes in act two,” my father calls out, but the team is loose and ready to play.
The fairies don’t so much call me over as draw me to them with their eyes.
“Morning, ladies,” I say. “Ron.”
“Oh, Ronnie’s one of us girls,” says Glory, and Ron smiles pleasantly.
“So, obviously I am not attending Nick’s soiree,” I say.
“Ohhhhh, no, you have to!” says Glory. “We need you to!”
“You’re all invited,” I say. “You go!”
“Oh, we are, dear. We’re going to light up!” Glory beams.
“Do you mean light up, like, a joint?”
“No, she means get lit,” says Peg.
“We will make a cameo,” says Barb. “People like it when old people party.” This is true.
“But we need you on the inside,” says Peg. “To keep a lid on him.”
“Yeah, guys, I just, I see how this is a really fun opportunity for . . .”
“The ‘locals’?” says Barb.
“Ha! Well, yes?”
“And you are royalty in this scenario?” Peg has a tightness in her voice that I don’t love.
“I’m just a regular gal who has been forced to socialize with Nick Nolan enough to fill a dozen lifetimes, and a night off wouldn’t kill me.” They don’t need to know how much of that socializing was conducted in the nude.
“Unless it does,” whispers Glory. “He’s trouble.” She raises her eyebrows in what I think she thinks is an ominous way.
“You’re our eyes and ears on the floor,” Ron says, even though we are all on the same floor.
“We’ll see you there.” Barb pats my arm, a confirmation, and I wonder why I have let a band of septuagenarians bully me.
I make my way backstage for rehearsal. I slip behind the curtain leg upstage right, in place for my entrance, and notice my parents off to the side, out of sight from the audience.
They are whisper-fighting. Mom has her hands on her hips, Dad is pointing at her, furious.
I can’t tell what they are saying. I have rarely seen them like this; they often bicker but never fight.
She throws her hands up and storms off to her entrance spot.
I watch my father: He stands there for a long moment, shoulders slumped.
He rubs his face wearily, sighs heavily, then bolsters himself and makes his way across the stage and into the audience, calling, “Places!”