A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  Then the lights went out.

  Stepping offstage, arms still soaked and sticky with blood, I held on to Samuel’s shoulder for balance. “I think I’m going crazy, bro. I think I’m losing hold of my mind.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “You are about to give the greatest performance of your life.”

  “Will that make me feel better?” I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  “Did you hear that woman out there?”

  He sheepishly nodded his head, patted my shoulder, and sprinted all three hundred pounds to the far stage right door for his next entrance.

  I went to my dressing room and closed the door and washed my arms. I had thirteen minutes until my first real scene. My roommate, Ezekiel, was onstage (I could hear his voice over the monitor), and this was my opportunity to be alone, pull myself together, and warm up my voice. The Lyceum Theatre is not small. Pinning your t’s to the back wall, as J.C. kept asking me to do, was no easy effort.

  First, I had to change clothes into another badass black leather coat. These were easily the best costumes I’d ever had. I lay down on the floor of my dressing room, underneath the mirrors and makeup table, and began my warm-up exercises.

  MAW NAW LAW THAW VAW ZAW

  MOO NOO LOO THOO VOO ZOO

  MAH NAH LAH THAH VAH ZAH

  For some reason, this idiotic woman out in the audience had galvanized my energy and I was not nervous anymore; I was angry. Virgil was right, they didn’t deserve us. My voice felt good. Strong. I was going to be all right. I became bored of warming up. It’s always struck me as a pansy thing to do anyway. I still had nine minutes before I went on. I poked my head out of my dressing room. Down the hall exiting from stage right was “Mistress Quickly,” played by a lovely older actress. I liked her. She always brought me cookies and brownies and begged me to eat better. She said I looked like a piece of rope and that she prayed for me every night. Just making eye contact with her made my eyes sting a little. I felt my anger twist and spin into pathetic, self-pitying tears. I couldn’t cry right now. I had only eight minutes before I went on.

  Through the backstage hallway, the performance could be heard over the monitors, marching through the text like a train deliberately moving down the tracks. If Mistress Quickly didn’t touch me I would be able to hold it together. I looked to the ground, to avoid her gaze. She tapped me on the shoulder. I looked at her and let her soft arms fold around me. Why did she have to fucking hug me?

  I held myself together long enough to close the door of my dressing room, where I promptly exploded into a howl. The sound of which was animal. I had seven minutes before I went onstage and tears were leaping out of my eyes like paratroopers. I started punching the walls, hoping the pain in my fists would stop me from crying, but I couldn’t feel anything. For five weeks, all I had been doing was worrying. Worrying about my kids, my voice, my marriage, my useless prick (I was still carrying the humiliation of not being able to fuck Brigitte Bardot), and my performance. I couldn’t go onstage without fear of losing my voice. I didn’t like going outside for fear of a sore throat—there was less light each evening and it was getting colder every afternoon. I didn’t want to see my friends because whenever I did I couldn’t stop myself from drinking ridiculous amounts of whiskey and talking nonstop about my ex-wife.

  I actually thought Mary would be at this evening’s performance. I didn’t think she would let our family fall apart. I kept thinking she would show up at my door. I longed for her to make some gesture of reconciliation, yet I couldn’t make one myself. I couldn’t reach out to her.

  In the moments before our wedding, waiting for Mary to walk down the aisle, I was so happy and proud. Nervously, I stood in my tuxedo and looked up into the rafters of the church and saw a five-year-old girl playing up near the organ pipes. It was a hallucination, but still somehow I felt this child’s realness. The little girl waved at me and smiled a sly, contagious grin. She burst out laughing as the organ began to lurch into its bellyaching wail. It was a visitation. An angel. I knew it. I never told anybody this till right now. Not even my wife; it felt too secret and indefinable to go on yapping like it was a cute anecdote. The significance of this angel’s appearance would somehow be diminished in the telling, so I kept it to myself. The little angel girl was teasing me, mocking my formal stance and my bow tie. I laughed too. As Mary began to walk down the aisle, for the first time in my life I knew I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Now, in the dark of my dressing room, I had to wonder what had gone so terribly wrong. Is this the end of the poem? People don’t write their own vows, make up poems, and see angels as music chimes, and then have nasty venom-spitting divorces, do they? I had zero doubts about my marriage as I said my vows, but where is my angel now? Oh no, I thought, I cheated on my wife, and that is why heaven’s cherubim will take away my voice!

  Seven minutes until my entrance and my face was getting more red and blotchy. I was hyperventilating. White spots were swimming around my eyeballs. I couldn’t even find my breath. Where was it even supposed to be? My chest was heaving in great giant silent swells, like that of a ten-year-old child who has fallen from a swing.

  My dresser, a sweet young guy named Michael, knocked at my door.

  “You OK in there? Need some help?”

  I couldn’t speak. I went to the dressing room toilet and locked myself in there so I couldn’t hear his voice.

  My chest finally released in loud, convulsing sobs.

  I’m aware I don’t intimately understand fuck all about true suffering. I see what’s happening in the world. I read the paper. The polar caps are melting. I see the poverty and the disease. I comprehend that mankind is immersed in some larger, massive struggle…but I thought I was complete, finished, a fully cooked mature adult male human being, I mean before all this happened. At around twenty-eight, twenty-nine, or thirty years old, after my kids were born, I figured I’d hit some plateau that was adulthood—where I believed things would just stay level for about forty years while I would do great work and have interesting experiences—then rather uneventfully I’d begin to decay and die. But this was just not the case. I was not on a plateau. I was descending, tripping, stumbling, and burning. My whole being, or personality or self or whatever is supposed to be the seat of me, or the soul behind my eyes, was being boiled away in a giant iron cauldron like the flavor leaving a carrot.

  “Are you trying to kill me?” Michael screamed with keys in his hand as he unlocked the first door. “Clean up and get onstage.”

  I just wailed from behind the still closed toilet door.

  “I know why you’re sad,” he said, quietly, through the crack, “I read the papers. But this is one of those moments, right now, this moment, when you either grow up or you grow down.”

  I turned off the bathroom light so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at myself in the mirror.

  “Stop cryin’ and listen”—he paused—“I’m your dresser, and I know everything. I want you to go home tonight and put a sign on your door that says: ‘No Narcissistic Bitches Allowed!’ Can you hear me?”

  In the dark I punched myself hard on one temple to try to stop crying.

  “You’re sad because you are getting a divorce, but what you don’t know is that you were never married. Do you hear me? I don’t lie in bed at night and wonder if my husband loves me. I know he does! You seem to have this intellectual view that maybe all married people are like you, either living ‘unexplored’ lives or are secretly unhappy. But that’s not true. I love my husband and he loves me.”

  My head was bruised and throbbing.

  “My husband is my best friend. When I was on tour last year with Bye Bye Birdie, he took care of everything—laundry, school forms, bathtime for our son, soccer practice, our taxes, everything, and I would do the same for him because we love one another. We share the same beliefs.
Love is not a feeling. It’s action.”

  I was crying so hard there was no way I was going to stop. This guy needed to just go tell the stage manager or somebody that I couldn’t go on.

  “You don’t even remember this, because you and your wife are so self-centered, but I spent Thanksgiving with you and your hotshot wife. I’ve been to your house.”

  This stopped me. I had no memory of ever meeting this man before. “When my husband, Henry, was dancing in one of her videos, we got invited. Whoop-de-do! I went to your daughter’s playhouse and hung out with your wife’s assistant and the Guatemalan cleaning lady and that big-titted nanny. And you and your wife acted like it was such a fuckin’ privilege to be in your presence but you two didn’t even notice that both my husband and I left your house feeling sorry for you guys. I wanted to steal your sweet kids. Wow! The cook made a great dinner! Wow! The big-titted nanny was great at playing games—the children didn’t bother us at all during that air-stifling conversation of a meal! Who cares! I would have rather ordered a pizza and watched TV!”

  I started listening, wondering what he was talking about.

  “You do not need to be depressed about getting a divorce, cowboy. You may feel like you are dying, but let me tell you, you were dead! But the thing is, dead people don’t know they’re dead. You’re crying ’cause you are getting pushed through some kind of rebirth canal. Wake up and serve those children. Get the best custody deal you can—I don’t care if it’s one stinkin’ day a year—it will be one stinkin’ day a year they get to have a grown man for a father. You are a good man—go find a good woman—and have a good life. ‘Nice’ is not a bad word. Nice partner equals nice life. Crazy partner equals crazy life—you get it?”

  “Why did I marry her?” I mumbled through the door.

  “Are you nuts? Are you a crazy person? She is so fucking beautiful! I love her! She is like my favorite! She’s everyone’s favorite, OK. Don’t be mad at yourself about that. Come on, she’s a frigging legend! The real question is why did she marry you?”

  I was silent.

  “Find your sense of humor, big shot!” he shouted. I looked up at the clock. I had four minutes and twenty seconds before I was due back in front of the audience. Michael was still trying to open my bathroom door.

  “I can’t go onstage,” I muttered, snot pouring out of my nose. “I can’t stop fucking crying. Tell somebody I can’t do it.”

  “I know you feel like a failure, and you’re right ’cause you did fail. But everybody’s gotta lose sometime. Are you going to kick your feet and whine or are you going to go over the game plan and study which plays didn’t work and why, so that you can win tomorrow? You don’t have to throw out the whole plan; just the marrying a brilliant-smoking-hot-icy-stuck-up princess part. You’ve always been a smart kid, I’ve been a fan for years, but you’re thirty-two years old now, killer, and it’s time to be the best version of you and grow out of the needy I-want-everybody-to-like-me guy. That’s what I never like about your profession. It indulges all you actors. I see it every production I work on. What you need right now is to know where you want to be in five years, and a goddamn printout of your to-do list. One step at a time. What do I want to accomplish in this tiny lifetime and how am I gonna do it?”

  “I want to stay married,” I mumbled with three minutes and ten seconds to go.

  “Uh-oh, you’re forgetting what the sign on your door says: ‘No Narcissistic Bitches Allowed!’ Damn. So…that means you cannot stay married to her. Not if you want to have a nice life. You two built a house on shaky ground. Now go take what you learned, find some firm ground, and build again. Mary should do the same thing, by the way—she deserves someone who will love her for who she is, instead of someone who is always wanting to change her—which is what I imagine you did.”

  “I did do that!” I said, and I was crying some more. Less than three minutes. Michael was beginning to sound desperate.

  “Come on, William,” my dresser continued, “show your kids you can handle some adversity. Show them you are making good decisions. You’ve got deeper roots than the ones you laid down with their mother. Sometimes you gotta fight back in this life. Harvey Milk. Rosa Parks. You want to know why Nelson Mandela went to jail? ’Cause he kicked back hard. That gorgeous young man was stockpiling weapons. People act like he was some kind of preacher. He was trying to buy tanks from Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. Then they wanted to let him out of prison—all he had to do was toe the nonviolence line. He said if they released him from prison and apartheid was still law then the first thing he would do is see if he could get some tanks from the Chinese. He said, ‘Fuck you, you Nazi pigs!’ He kicked back. You got to find your guts and hire a crackin’ lawyer and let this screamin’ Judy Garland diva know that these kids have a daddy who loves them and that he is gonna claim them. Your life will speak for itself. Go out there and reclaim yourself. When I first saw you act I was like thirteen and you played that stuttering juvenile delinquent. I was so jealous of you. You were beautiful. Make me jealous again.”

  He paused. One minute, five seconds.

  “WILLIAM!” he screamed.

  One minute, one second.

  “Come on, William,” he continued. “You are exactly where you are supposed to be. Trust me, we all are. Most of us don’t know ourselves very well, and that’s why it’s so fucking important to put on plays.”

  I sobbed. Forty-five seconds.

  “WILLIAM! If you do not get onstage I will get fired!”

  I opened the bathroom door.

  “Come on, you asshole, quit crying, we can still make it,” he said, putting my costume back together and wiping my face with a wet cloth. It was obvious this guy had experience with this kind of antics. “Be brilliant,” he whispered. “It’s Broadway, for fuck’s sake. Then go home and eat some pasta. You look like a friggin’ junkie. OK?”

  “OK,” I said, finally standing straight up. Twelve seconds.

  “What’s the sign on your door say?” he asked, pushing me down the hallway.

  “I’m exactly where I am supposed to be?” Eight seconds.

  “No.” He pushed me through the stage left door.

  “No narcissistic bitches allowed?” Four seconds.

  “You’re on,” he whispered and everything disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  My first scene began with a showdown of sorts between the King and Hotspur. When I walked onstage, I put my hands behind my back and tried to act unembarrassed by my red, blotchy face. The King shouts and scolds me until I can take it no longer and then I launch into my defense—a long, beautiful monologue that is often done at auditions for theater schools. It’s a cumbersome beast and you can lose the audience entirely by the tenth line; but not so on this night. I just locked eyes with my King and disappeared inside the play.

  The King never “acted” at all. The words fell out of him. Deep in his gaze you could see a castle and tapestries, you could even smell the air of a summer afternoon in London six hundred years ago. He spoke with every aspect of his body, motivating my next line with a skeptical glance. He kept trying to interrupt me, guiding me effortlessly, heating my anger and impatience line by line. In my actual life, I’d never been able to access anger. I would twist inside and punch walls, but I have always been uncomfortable with conflict and could never approach anger head-on.

  Now, something was changing. My anger at my wife was like a stream coursing down a mountain, gaining in power and speed. Onstage, this fury was free to take full form. I screamed at the King, and after he exited, I screamed about him. I wasn’t worried about losing my voice. There was no next show. No tomorrow night. I roared.

  That first preview, and during the first four weeks of previews that followed, I would baby my voice all day with green apples, tea, honey, lemons, zinc lozenges, cough drops, and jalapeños by the dozens�
�any trick I heard, I would try. But then, when I got onstage, I would scream my balls off. I couldn’t help it. People talked to me about breathing from my diaphragm, and all kinds of other parlor tricks designed to keep me from hurting myself. They didn’t realize I liked hurting myself. My character was a spitfire and that’s what I wanted him to do: spit motherfuckin’ flaming cannon shot. I would think about my wife and the ways she would dismiss me and scold me, criticize me, make fun of me, demean me. I would meditate on why the fuck she thought our kids should live with her, and before I knew it, I would be up in some other actor’s face, ripping his head off. I’d hated being married. I didn’t want to be buried with that woman, or anyone. I wanted my own goddamn tombstone.

  That first preview I sounded my barbaric yawp from center stage in a spotlight surrounded by twelve hundred people. My black leather snapped with every gesture. I was alive. The audience was right where we needed them. It’s hard to explain, but you can feel it when over a thousand people are hanging on your every word, and it feels good.

  My first scene ends with a pop, in the form of a rhyming couplet:

  Uncle, adieu: O, let the hours be short

  Till fields and blows and groans applaud our sport!

  When I was done, I would go backstage and alternate smoking and steaming my throat.

  I was only happy during a performance. I wished the play were ninety-two hours long.

  I just prayed I could make it till opening night. I didn’t care if I died after that.

  When the second intermission came, at hour three, Hotspur was dead and my own life returned. I felt good now, purged, and snuck out into the alley behind the theater to have a cigarette. A bunch of the other “dead” guys were out there, too. We were a unique sight: six bloody knights, in full armor, passing around a lighter and a soft pack of American Spirits, in an alley off Forty-fifth Street, leaning on a dumpster and talking about the “house.’’