Chapter 2 #2
“You must be the press. I’m Damien. Damien Carter.
” He says his own name with a small pause after it, leaving room for a reaction.
I don’t give him one. “I do a lot of press. The trick, and I’ll give you this for free, is that a profile lives or dies on access, so consider me” —he taps his own chest— “open. Byways, right? Sweet little magazine. I think I did their cover once.”
“That was Yankee,” Skye says. “It was a listicle. You were number eight.”
“It was a feature, angel.” He turns back to me.
“Regional coverage is the soul of the American theater, that’s what I’ve always said.
You know, I did a sit-down with the Times once — this was during my second run at the Belasco — and the writer said to me, ‘Damien, the camera loves you but the stage forgives you.’ I’ve never forgotten it.
You can use that.” He pats my hand and releases it.
“Anything you need, my door is open. Well. My mother’s door is. ”
He scans the room and I watch him find what he’s looking for in real time. His gaze locks on Pru, three rows over, running her lines with her back to him. He immediately crosses to her.
“Prudie.”
She ignores him.
“Prudence, darling!” He drops into the chair beside her, arm along the seatback.
“Damien.” Pru turns to look at him, and her expression, is similar to one I’d imagine she gives to opposing counsel when they’ve cited the wrong statute.
“Twenty-five years, and you still say my name like it’s a curse.”
“Damien,” she repeats. “In this production, you are my husband, I am your wife, we murder a houseguest, and at no other point do you need to be within ten feet of me. Places were five minutes ago.”
She gets up, squirming to avoid his outstretched arm, and walks to the stage.
Damien laughs and turns to the room at large. “She’s always been like that,” he says, as though he’s just been paid a compliment. “Fire. You can’t teach it.”
Skye, who clearly witnessed this whole interaction along with the rest of us, still has the smile on, but she’s stopped blinking. For about a second and a half she watches Pru walk away with fixed attention, but then Damien touches her elbow. She blinks, then she’s sweet again.
“Babe,” she says. “Drink your greens.”
* * *
The second attempt at the run-through starts nineteen minutes late. Englebert, who is installed on a stool in the wings with his tail wrapped around his feet, announces that this is an improvement.
The witches open on the thunder cue. Dorcas delivers her lines flatly, in the same tone she’d inform you she’s out of focaccia. Tiffany’s nasal voice comes out sharpened to a point. She’s honestly perfect for the role.
When Pru comes on with Macbeth’s letter, the whole gym goes quiet — even Tiffany, who has been posted up in the wings muttering every word along with her.
Mayor Blackwood was cast as Duncan, and he’s playing the King of Scotland as though… well, as though it’s a mayoral campaign. He enters waving. He has, I’m told, asked twice whether Duncan could shake hands with the front row on his way in. He was twice refused.
Tonight he strides downstage , spreads his arms at the painted castle, and delivers one of his famous lines… or at least delivers the start of it. “This castle hath a pleasant—”
Before he can finish his sentence, the cauldron starts producing fog and doesn’t stop.
It’s been sitting cold on stage right since the witches’ scene ended half an hour ago, holding six inches of water, a rubber frog, and whatever Dorcas added “for the smell.” The fog machine, which is supposed to be emanating a low creep of haze around the kettle’s base, is now instead pouring out columns of smoke and, for some reason, making a horrible sound that somewhat resembles the honk of a startled goose.
Moonbeam says, off-stage and off-script but in character, “Sisters, is this us?” and then the leading edge of the fog bank rolls off the stage apron and into the front row, where Skye disappears entirely with a small shriek.
“Cody!” Vivian is on her feet. “Cody, kill it!”
“It’s not— The button’s not—” says Cody’s voice from somewhere inside the cloud.
There’s a pop from the direction of the light board, and the stage lights die and then the work lights die.
The hall drops into darkness save for the red EXIT signs and the rectangle of Skye’s phone glowing from inside the fog like a jellyfish.
“WHO,” says Englebert, from the blackness, “SAID THE NAME?”
“Six fifty-two,” Emma reports from the audience by penlight. “I won’t name names. But I heard it.”
Englebert has made his way to the stage. The emergency lights have shuddered on by now, dim and orange, and they catch him at the edge, above the fog, tail lashing, addressing the entire hall.
“How many times,” he says, into the half-dark. He exaggerates every syllable. I hear it end on the downbeat.
“How many times must I entreat this room? The play is called the SCOTTISH PLAY indoors.”
Pru, who has come up beside me, whispers, “Oh no. Is he about to lecture us in—”
“I think he is,” I nod.
“Is this a fog I see before me now?” he continues.
“Nay, it is but a plague invited in by careless mortal lips and loosened tongues.” He paces back and forth as he speaks.
“One rule. ONE rule I set before this troupe: thou shalt not speak the name beneath this roof — and lo, the fourth wall FALLS. The kettle SPEAKS. Out, out, damned cast! Get thee outside, turn thrice and spit and swear and knock and PRAY.”
He stops, but doesn’t break eye contact with the room. He’s breathing hard.
“That last part wasn’t pentameter,” Emma says quietly, checking her fingers.
“IT WAS TROCHAIC FOR EMPHASIS.”
Mayor Blackwood — the sitting mayor of Duskboro, King Duncan of Scotland — looks around the dark hall at his constituents, sighs, and walks up the aisle toward the lobby doors.
“For the record,” he says, passing my seat. “I’m only doing this for morale.”
“Six fifty-two p.m.,” I say. “You said the name. Noted.”
Through the lobby windows, in the last blue of the evening, the town’s chief executive turns three times in the parking lot, spits into the hedge, says a word I will be paraphrasing for a regional family magazine, and knocks on the Community Center door to be let back in.
Somewhere behind me in the fog, Dana strikes a match and lights an emergency lantern she’s apparently been keeping under the ticket table.
“I suppose we’ll call this intermission,” she says.