A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  If you want to be happy

  For the rest of your life,

  Never make a pretty woman your wife,

  So from my personal point of view,

  Get an ugly girl to marry you!

  Then they would dangle their hair in front of my face and shake their magical young titties by my mouth. Turning up my face to the stars, I thought, You gotta be kidding.

  Finally, at about 5:00 in the morning, I got Brigitte alone and in a cab hustling back to the Mercury. We made out the whole way downtown. Kissing her was like rubbing my face in a birthday cake.

  “Please,” she whispered. “This night has been so perfect. I don’t want to rush. I don’t want you to think I’m a tease, but I really have only slept with two boys and I don’t know if I’m ready to move this fast.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t want anything from you. I just need help to fall asleep. And…I’m in love with you.” I was out of my mind, and just pleased to have momentarily forgotten my first preview was later that same day.

  Back in my hotel room we messed around until the sun was high. Finally, at what felt like 9:00 or 10:00 a.m., she took off her underwear and said, “Let’s do it.” Immediately I tried to insert my prick inside her. Fucking this girl, I figured, would do worlds for my self-esteem. I needed this. This was important for me, and the show. But I knew if I thought too much about it I would lose my erection—so I had to charge.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she said, pushing me away. “One question, I can’t help it, but I have to ask,” she said tenderly.

  “Sure,” I said, holding my breath, thinking it would prevent my prick from descending. She sat up naked in bed, the sheet tousled around her elegantly. Then, in the gentle morning light, with her hair over her eyes, she asked sincerely,

  “Am I as pretty as your wife?”

  Scene 2

  For every high, there’s a low. After failing to make love to Brigitte Bardot, I walked her out into the morning light to get a taxi. She seemed happy to escape. The ways in which I hated myself seemed to be multiplying, taking the shape of a scorpion living in my nasal cavity. On the elevator, headed back up to my room, I longed for suicide the way I imagine a woman in labor might long for birth.

  My mom was flying in that afternoon from Haiti to see the first preview, and to attempt some public damage control. Mary’s assistant had called and said Mary was leaving town for some last-minute press obligation for her album release. So, after school the kids were on their way to the Mercury. I was never going to get any sleep.

  Mysteriously, my voice was a little better. I went into a deli to buy some lozenges, juice, potato chips, PowerBars, Emergen-C, aspirin, and cigarettes, and there on the magazine rack was the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine with the most beatific, inspiring photograph of my estranged wife I had ever seen. She was on the covers of about three other glossies. Vogue, Elle, Cosmo, all that crap. But on the Rolling Stone cover her face was kind and rested, with sleepy bedroom eyes staring into the lens of the camera. Suddenly, I felt so proud of her. Of course, I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks. Her assistant answered all my calls and negotiated the kids’ movements, but it was nice to see the magazine cover. My wife was dressed in a little white teddy and seemed genuinely warm, and satiated. In this picture, she looked like the best friend I remembered. That was the woman I loved, prayed for, promised to honor. I picked up the magazine and flipped to the article. The headline read in bold black ink:

  would you cheat on this woman?

  The third time I read the line I vomited on the deli floor.

  * * *

  —

  I arrived at my dressing room for our first preview early, praying for a nap. I found a piece of paper taped to the door with the inscription “To W,” and an Elvis Presley quote explaining how onstage he felt his “heart was going to explode.” I knew the feeling. There was no signature. I looked around to see who could have left it, but the halls were empty. Sitting down in my station, I taped the quote to the mirror. Ezekiel wasn’t in yet. In a few hours, I would make my Broadway debut, but at that moment I couldn’t be positive I was even inside my body. It seemed perhaps I was floating above, a few inches alternately to the left or to the right. I hummed softly to myself. My voice was holding on. Finally, on the small bed in my dressing room, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up to a knock at my door. It was “Lady Percy” in a pink Clash T-shirt. She was nervous too. Her head wasn’t moving right.

  “Are you alone?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” I said, still sleepy. “Come on in.”

  “I don’t think I should.” She shifted her weight awkwardly in my doorway. She stared at me for a long, uncomfortable, silent moment. Suddenly, I got a squirrelly feeling, and wondered if she was going to kiss me.

  “I feel like I’m in drama school, you know?” She smiled a crooked sexy sort of snarl. “I mean, are you going through this too?”

  There was another long weighty pause.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Oh fuck you,” she said. “Are you really that out to lunch?”

  She turned down the hallway and clomped off to her dressing room.

  Oh boy, I thought, here we go.

  * * *

  —

  Backstage, 8:02 p.m., approximately three minutes before the first preview, I was dressed in thick black leather, on my knees in the utter darkness of the Lyceum. My head was shaved and cold. My throat was raw and hurting. My hands were shaking so badly that I had to clasp them together and bite my knuckles to pray:

  Dear St. Christopher,

  Please forgive me. Forgive me for being so irresponsible.

  Tonight as the audience takes their seats and the clock spins past eight…I give thanks for my life and for this opportunity to contribute.

  And I ask for a blessing on this stage in the hours to follow.

  In return, I offer my love and my sincere desire to be in service to something larger than myself. I will do better.

  I had to remind myself to breathe. Exhaling, I hummed slightly, checking in for the 3,764th time that day to make sure my vocal cords could still produce sound. Why had I done that cocaine? I was so angry at myself, it was work not to punch myself in the face.

  I want to do a good job, but I know to do that I must let go of that desire. I must rely on my preparation, on my imagination, and on my breath.

  My breath is the connective tissue between my fellow players, the audience, and myself. My breath is alive. It is not ahead of me or behind me. It is present and immediate.

  So am I.

  I hummed again quietly to myself. In the last twenty-four hours this odd animal hum had ballooned into a full-blown nervous tic. I couldn’t stop. Much of the time I was totally unaware of it. I was either warming up my voice or making sure it was still there. My vocal cords were in tatters, and my eyes would well up with salty tears as I contemplated my own pathetic voice. All day long my throat had ached in some odd muscular way. It was difficult for me to stop imagining the horror I would suffer if I blew my cords out completely when I was onstage. I pictured myself squawking like a frog with its tongue cut out in front of mocking thousands. Everyone hated me so much these days, I was sure a spectacularly humiliating Broadway failure would please the world immensely. The Internet would ignite with joyous derision if I embarrassed myself in some particularly dramatic fashion.

  I believe in the theater.

  I believe that in dialogue, thought, expression, and communication, a healing can take place—I ask to be a part of that healing.

  If I can be of service, I offer up everything. I offer my whole life.

  Forgive me. Let me be your voice and be of service.

 
I was teetering on the edge of what some people might call a stage ten anxiety attack, like a man about to be shot to the moon. This is why all those British hams are drunks, I thought: stage fright. I yearned for a pint of whiskey. When my nerves go ballistic, they physically obscure my vision. My focus turns hazy and images seem to vibrate red with my pulse. Beyond the blackness of the auditorium around me I could hear the audience sitting down, turning off their cell phones, chatting about trivial things, folding their coats.

  I pray for everyone in the audience, that this night may sit inside the larger context of their life as some beautiful piece of fabric neatly laying in with the weave—I pray that they forgive my deficits, or at least find some value in them.

  Oh God, I cannot tell you. I did my first play when I was thirteen goddamn years old and back then I couldn’t wait to get onstage. I was light as a feather, happy, shimmering with wonder. Now, at thirty-two, I was supposed to know what I was doing. Acting on the big stage with the best people. Broad-Fucking-Way. Even the guys with two or three lines were trained, and talented. They’d all played King John at Arizona rep or something like that. I was a dopey movie actor. I am a bed swerver! A cheat! I wear the scarlet letter! The guy who ran around on Redbook magazine’s “Mother of the Year”! Noooooo, I screamed in my head. Calm down. Breathe. Pray.

  I pray for all the writers, living and dead. Shakespeare and the guy Shakespeare ripped off. The young playwright with his second play, all the writers who feel more nervous and more responsible than I, I pray that they know that if their play is any good at all—it’s not theirs.

  I pray for the directors, standing in the backs of the theaters counting empty seats…looking for one last thing to control.

  When I breathed in and out and prayed, my pulse would return closer to a normal, sustainable beat.

  I pray for all the theaters everywhere across the earth—the ones in the war zones, the ones in the basements of mosques, or in the parks of Argentina, the ones on the West End and the ones in Tokyo—for in them lies the possibility for some kind of magic, mystic, holy conjuring.

  Just as thought leads action, imagination leads consciousness—and the theater is the living consciousness of the world. There is a healing imaginative dance between the audience, the light, the music, the rhythm of a few carefully chosen words, the spontaneous gesture of a certain actress’s left hand. A dance that announces: WE ARE ALIVE TODAY, MAYBE NOT TOMORROW. THIS IS REAL. THIS IS NOW. This is my prayer: that I may be present for this evening.

  Standing up, I breathed into my belly and hummed again to myself, checking my voice for the 3,775th time that day. I was feeling a bit better maybe, a small reprieve. I was beginning to be able to see again. There was a spot near the edge of the curtain where I could get an angle and peer out at the audience. I did. I knew I shouldn’t look at the jury, but I wanted to know if she was there. My wife, Mary. I knew she was furious with me, kissing some dude named Valentino, but I thought maybe she would show. Maybe she sensed how scared I was and would get a sitter and come see my silly play. Afterwards, she would arrive backstage, come to my dressing room, and we’d both weep and hold each other. The pain and alienation we had been feeling would fall from our shoulders and our friendship would return, ushering in a healing.

  I peeked out and scanned all the faces. Somehow I believed that if my wife came to the play, we could get back together. That was my gut instinct. All my hope was placed there. If she came to the play, it would mean she loved me and knew I had been punished enough. It would be a gesture of admission that I was not alone in creating the dissolution of our holy covenant. My shoulders relaxed as I considered how happy my daughter would be at the reconciliation. The thought of that small girl smiling, waking me (getting the words “spring” and “morning” confused as she used to), saying, “Dada, it’s springtime, wake up,” sent splinters of joy through my body.

  I scanned the seats. Mary wasn’t there. There are about twelve hundred seats in the Lyceum Theatre, but I could tell my wife wasn’t sitting in one of them. I felt the heartbreak fresh. When I was a little boy, I’d always wanted my own parents to get back together, not because it made sense, but because I wanted love to have a logic I could follow. Even at twenty-one or twenty-two I would still have dreams where I’d see my parents kissing in the back of a car. Could love just vanish? Horrible cruel things my wife had said to me replayed through my mind. I remembered sentences that came out of my mouth that I could never take back.

  Oh shit, I realized. I forgot to pray for her or my kids.

  So there, still hidden in the shadows of the offstage props and curtains, I tucked my sword around, and got back on my knees. I continued almost out loud:

  Dear St. Christopher,

  Let me not forget my children.

  Help me to remember them….Bless their movements, answer their prayers…

  Then I tried with my whole being to ask St. Christopher to smile favorably on the mother of my children, to bless Mary’s movements, but I couldn’t. I could not pray for her. I knew it was in my kids’ best interest for their mother to thrive, to be content and fulfilled…so I tried again. On my knees, I looked up to heaven, into a ceiling lined with lights that were “leashed in like hounds,” about to be set ablaze. I wanted to pray for peace and, in doing so, cool the boiling blood that was screeching in my gut, but I still couldn’t. She had tricked me. She said she’d love me forever, and she didn’t even like me anymore. Or had I tricked her? Why did she get our children? Our house? Our life? Why was she talking about me all over the world? I didn’t want St. Christopher or God or anyone to smile on my wife. I knew what I wanted to ask St. Christopher: I wanted my fucking kids. I couldn’t say that—I couldn’t say anything. Some mammoth Moloch of hatred was swelling and hooked inside my throat. I couldn’t breathe. My veins were engorging against my leather collar, tightening, choking me.

  How was I going to go on? I was dizzy.

  Someone put a hand on my shoulder. It was Samuel, dressed in chain-mail armor. Big Sam played a nameless character that was Hotspur’s main henchman, my right-hand dude. We had some killer battle scenes in the second act. At six foot six and at least three hundred pounds, he had been an all-state middle linebacker in high school and college. He approached acting just as he had approached football: “I just keep my head on a swivel and contain trouble,” he would say. He was my friend.

  “Come on, man,” he said calmly. “Our cue light’s on.”

  * * *

  —

  What is it about standing in front of our fellow men that makes our voices shake, our balls yank up inside our bellies, and our knees quiver? Why do we assume they hate us? Was high school that bad?

  Big Sam and I stood in the darkness with a bucket of blood at our feet. We dipped our swords and arms deep into the warm, thick red syrup until we were the image of dripping violence that our director wanted. Now we waited. Staring at the light, waiting for it to go out. Over the monitor, you could hear the stage manager say, “PLACES FOR ACT ONE.”

  The houselights dimmed and immediately the audience hushed.

  As the announcement asking people to unwrap their candies and turn off their cell phones began, I could hear our Falstaff walk through the backstage door. Virgil was crawling to his position like a homeless madman, muttering to himself, with his dresser following, trying to give the fat man his belt and sword.

  “Fuck all you people. Leave your cell phones on, you slimy, sleazy limousine bastards,” he called out to the audience. “Think you can stay awake for a four-hour Shakespeare play, do you? Going to go back to college for a night, are you? Taking a break from funneling martinis down your gob to pretend like you have a brain? Want to get a little culture, you old, slave-owning scumbags!” They couldn’t hear him, but it was dangerously close.

  Everyone backstage deals with nerves a different way.

/>   “Dropped a hundred and fifty bucks so you could tell the friends at the yacht club that you’re not a complete moron. Or did you come here just so that the old hag would finally shut up? You don’t deserve this play. I fart on you. No, my gas is too precious for you elitist scumbags. I’ll bet there’s not one decent person out there. AHHH!” Virgil kicked at the floor of the stage, forcing himself to stand. “Why don’t I get a life?” He turned to face one of the stagehands, who move the heavy props around, and asked, “Why do I humiliate myself like this? Why do I perform like a monkey for these corpses?”

  The music swelled.

  I took a deep breath.

  I knew what was next.

  My cue light turned off. Samuel and I stepped forward. The five hundred thousand watts lit our faces.

  Our production began with a series of portraits of the major characters. Lights up, center stage on Prince Hal and Falstaff, passed out with three half-dressed women; lights down. Lights up, stage right with the King in his isolation; lights down. Lights up, center on Hotspur and his men dripping with fury and war; lights down. On and on like that, as all the major characters were introduced. When the lights were hot on my face I dug deep into my belly and tried to touch with my breath all the spirits inside me, attempting to unleash them as I stared out at the Broadway audience. I absorbed the watchful gaze of twelve hundred people in an instant. Almost immediately, with the follow spot exposing me fully and blood dripping from my ears, boots, and gloves, I heard quietly but clearly the voice of an old woman in the left side of the house whisper, “That’s him. That’s the one who cheated on his wife.”