by Ethan Hawke
The other guys eventually went back inside—they had more scenes—but I had forty-eight minutes to pass before curtain call. I was almost peaceful. This would become my most relaxed hour in any given day. My voice had made it through the show and it was too early to begin worrying about tomorrow night. That would start soon after the bows. I sat alone underneath the fire escapes listening to the city wind down. I could hear a few people who walked out of our play bad-mouthing us. That would happen almost every night but it never bothered me. A lot of people don’t like Shakespeare, there’s nothing you can do.
On my dressing room table I had a scatter shot of quarters and loose change. Still in costume, I bought an ice cream sandwich from the vending machine in the back hallway. That’s where Lady Percy found me.
“You were great tonight,” she said shyly, still in her black funeral costume.
“So were you,” I said sincerely. “I listened to your whole final speech. It’s always good. But tonight, it was great.”
“You just like it because I’m crying over you.”
I smiled. The show might’ve been good or bad, but there was no doubt she was brilliant.
“You have to forgive me about before the show,” she continued. “This has never happened to me before. I have a child and a husband I love. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“It’s OK,” I said, still not exactly sure what she was talking about. “Acting plays with a person’s head.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She looked at the floor. Then, as she spoke, she took my ice cream sandwich from my hand, unwrapped it neatly, and gave it back.
“When we were onstage together tonight I could hear your heart beating. It scared me a little bit. It was like I was holding a horse or something. You are so sad sometimes I feel like you are going to implode or pass out, and I want to hold you and tell you that you are doing a beautiful job…but I worry that if I do that I’m going to start kissing you.” She smiled. “But I won’t.”
And she walked away, towards her dressing room, her shoes clacking down the long hallway. My lord, she was an incredible woman.
Immediately, Virgil appeared storming in the other direction. He was rushing towards his final appearance in the new king’s coronation. He turned to me.
“Do you mind if I give you a small note of encouragement?” He spoke in his proxy pseudo-English accent.
I answered, with dignity, I thought, “You know what, Virgil? This is my first Shakespeare play ever and I’m on such a learning curve and getting so many notes from J.C. that I’d prefer if you gave any ideas to him and then I can get them all straight from the director. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” he answered demurely and then proceeded. “Your t’s are terrible. You must work on your t’s—without t’s and d’s it sometimes sounds as if you are only speaking with vowels.”
“Thank you,” I said, “that really helps.”
“You’ll do fine,” he said, and walked away. “Work on your a’s, too,” he shouted back. “They make Hotspur sound as if he should be fighting Mexicans at the Alamo.”
He suddenly stopped and stepped back, fiddling with his sword uncomfortably around his fat belly.
“This text was written by a great poet, it’s true, but remember he was also a very fine actor. It’s our job to transform literature into an event. We do this with why and how. Why our character speaks and how our character speaks. You do well with the why, William, that’s why you’re good on film.”
This may sound like a compliment, but it wasn’t.
“For you, it’s the how that needs work. Start with your t’s and d’s.” He finally got his sword situated in a way he liked and looked up at me.
“Oh, don’t be a pouty face.” He smiled the irrepressible grin of a bouncing sheepdog. “You’d do well with Chekhov—it’s a better fit for you. Chekhov gives the actor the leaves—and we must build the tree. But Shakespeare provides the whole tree—only the leaves are ours. Get out of the way. Getting your consonants correct helps ‘you’ be quiet and lets the character speak.” And with that, he bolted down the hallway towards the stage left entrance, dropping his sword as he charged. The metal clamored on the floor and three people struggled to be the first to give it back to him.
* * *
—
Now there are few things in life as depressing as a lackluster curtain call, and the first preview of our Henry was not for the easily disheartened. The shuffling of hundreds of old people rising from their naps, mixed with the paltry sound of a handful of ambulance chasers (folks that buy tickets for a first preview want to see shit go wrong), politely clapping. It was not the embrace we’d been expecting. As we took our last bow, people started standing, and for a moment I thought—Hold on! Wait, is this a standing ovation? No. They were just leaving. They were trying to make the 11:40 p.m. New Jersey Transit Trenton local train. Or get their car out of the parking garage before the next hour is charged, who knows? But we couldn’t get offstage fast enough. Virgil Smith, our beloved Falstaff, took out his sword and pretended to commit hara-kiri in the steps down to the dressing room. A few people laughed.
* * *
—
“You depressed?” our director asked us. “You should be.”
All thirty-nine members of the cast were assembled in the seats of the theater where our audience had sat only twenty minutes earlier. We were patiently waiting for one of the inspirational notes sessions we had come to expect from our director. Most of the company had their jackets on and their feet up on the chairs in front of them, lounging. Everyone’s faces looked pale and vulnerable, freshly stripped of their makeup.
“I’m not going to take up too much of your time,” our director began. “I know it’s late and you’re all tired. I just also know I’m too upset to fall asleep tonight without telling you all how disgusted I am.” He spoke with a sense of resignation. “To tell you the God’s honest truth: watching you all act tonight made me want to quit this profession.”
J.C. stood on the stage, staring out at us. He seemed to be in physical pain. His eyes were wet. Slowly we pulled our feet down from the chairs in front of us and assumed a more respectful body language.
“I don’t want to be too dramatic here,” he said from dead center stage. “As individuals, you were all OK, I guess. But as a company, you failed. I failed.” He paused and shuffled his feet some more. “I’m going to focus tonight on the ‘tavern scenes.’ I’ll begin there.” He paused and wiped some lint from his jacket. I breathed a sigh of relief; Hotspur makes nary an appearance in the tavern.
“What the fuck happened! What the fuck!” The floorboards shook as he punched one hand into the other. “Where did you all go? Have I been talking to myself for six weeks? You guys want to bring your high school acting coach up here onstage with you and thank her? ’Cause you looked like a bunch of amateurs. ‘Gee whiz, everybody, look at me. I’m acting on Broadway! Isn’t this fun?’ No, it is not. It’s expensive and boring. If I’m going to watch people masturbate, I’d rather go home and do it myself.”
Falstaff began nervously twitching in his seat.
“Not you, Virgil.” J.C. nodded to our white-bearded star. “You were very good. Inspired, in fact, and fully living up to the great actor that everyone on this planet knows you to be. Unfortunately, you were in a high school production of Henry the Fourth, Parts One and Two, tonight.” He paused, wiped his eyes, collected himself, and said, “I mean…Holy fuck.” He looked at the rest of us. “I wanted to walk onstage and kick somebody’s ass. All of you. Don’t you understand that I’m relying on you? We are relying on each other. What happened?” He paused as if one of us might have an explanation. “What happened to all the work we’ve been doing?”
He looked straight at big Samuel, who was sitting next to me. Samuel’s three-hundred-pound body was stuffed into the theater’s folding
seat. His eyes were stinging with tears. He was biting his lip as he stared at Virgil. Samuel was featured in all the tavern scenes.
The day before, after our invited dress rehearsal, Virgil had gone around to the dressing rooms of everyone in the aforementioned tavern scenes and personally asked them to tone down their business. He felt they were all upstaging him. He claimed he couldn’t even hear when he was getting a laugh. He felt strongly that he was being forced to compete for the audience’s attention—it was maddening and would they please stop.
“Samuel, I need some kind of explanation,” our director asked him directly. Samuel just sat there mute.
“Are you a professional actor?”
“Yes, I am,” he said.
“When I looked onstage, do you know what I saw on your face? The same thing I saw on the face of every single person in the tavern scenes…Oh my God, I’m onstage with Virgil Smith. I wonder where he keeps his Oscar?
“Yes, we want laughs. Yes, we want to be heard and liked, understood and appreciated—every performer wants that. Every child wants that. But what makes us adults, what makes us professionals, is that it is not our goal. Is our goal to get a standing ovation? To sell out the shows? To get a good review? To win the Tony? No. The goal is always to play our best. To meet the standards set by ourselves. This world we live in is full of alleged winners, people who appear to be succeeding who are secretly failing and people who appear to be failing who are succeeding. Nothing is as it seems. Virgil got all his laughs. The audience guffawed themselves silly over him and, all the while, in their heads, they were thinking, I wonder what I did with my parking ticket?; I wonder how long this show is?; I have so much work to do at home.”
We all sat dumb, like schoolkids in trouble.
“Trust me. If you all take the work we were doing in the rehearsal room and put it on the stage, you will be the best group of actors that I’ve ever worked with—and that includes you, Samuel. But I need you at your best, and I’m going to push you guys, because we are close.” He inhaled deeply into the soles of his feet. “None of that ‘acting’ shit, OK? Don’t do that to Virgil or to me; don’t do that to yourself. Remember: It’s not how far you throw your voice. It’s how far you throw your soul.”
I stared at Virgil, the fat fuck. Was he really not going to step forward and admit tonight’s disaster was his doing? Would he really let Samuel and the others fall on his sword?
Yes, he would.
“All right,” J.C. concluded. “Get some rest and we’ll start our work again tomorrow.”
I stood up and grabbed my jacket, still anxious to get home to my kids.
“Oh yeah,” J.C. added. “Where’s Prince Hal?”
“Right here.” The Prince stood up, pulling on the sleeves of his overcoat.
“How many fathers do you think Prince Hal has?” J.C. asked.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“There are a lot of people in the world. There are postmen, train conductors, librarians, actors, cops, doctors, soldiers, hairdressers…There’s a lot of people, right?”
The Prince nodded.
“Well, each one of us only has one father. One. Yours dies in Scene Two of Act Five. If it comes off like you are some somnambulistic jerk who, while walking down Ninth Avenue on his way to buy some Camel Lights, notices an old man who just fell over and croaked—I don’t even know why I am sitting here paying a hundred and eighty dollars to watch this shit. Do you get it? One father. He’s dead. He’s never coming back. Door closed. You’re next. You get it? Work on it. Until you do we may as well not lift the curtain.”
“I’m sorry, J.C., it’s just that…”
“I’m really not interested in why it didn’t work. I want it to work.”
Prince Hal stood motionless. I felt sorry for him. He was going to cry tonight.
“William, can I talk to you?” J.C. called out to me as people were meandering out.
My body rang with fear, like I’d been hit with a frying pan. He motioned for me to meet him privately by the exit. What could be so bad that it could not be said in front of others?
Underneath the stairwell at the back of the stage, I tried to meet J.C.’s gaze. He was whispering to me, which was terrifying.
“Your performance tonight was damn close to incendiary. It was just as I feel Hotspur should be played. I loved it, but it was also completely unsustainable. If you scream and howl like that every night for a week you will be in a hospital.”
I was confused. One part of me was elated that I had received a compliment in the morass of darkness; the other, scared of what he was trying to say. “I need you to take care of yourself. Pay attention to your voice. Listen to it. I’ve directed this play before and you must beware of Hotspur. It’s a lunatic part, and it’ll make you mad. You can get close, but don’t go all the way in. You understand me?”
I didn’t. I was scared.
“I’ll be OK,” I said.
“Are you OK right now?” he asked.
I nodded. He scoured my face with his eyes.
“My only problem is sometimes I get nervous that I am being outclassed by Prince Hal,” I said, smiling, cavalierly pretending I was joking.
“Is it not possible that you both can excel?” he responded. “This is not a movie, William, OK?” This was the cruelest thing he could have said to me, highlighting my lack of training and underscoring my paranoia that I did not deserve to be there in the first place. “Tonight, onstage, it seemed you had gasoline coming from your pores and set yourself on fire. I admit I took secret joy in it, but you will destroy your vocal cords or your back or something. If you keep that up, something inside of you will break.”
He paused and observed me again. The silence was terrifying.
“Just know that our hearts are huge,” he said, looking at me. “Do you know that? Our hearts are not some small little gizmos. They are fucking big and hang down in the middle of our chests. They’re beating and working their asses off but your heart doesn’t need your help, you get it? The talent that resides inside each person is not fragile. Your lungs aren’t in your chest, they’re in your back. Your voice isn’t in your throat, it begins in your spine, you get it?”
I didn’t understand, but I knew he was trying to bolster my confidence, and that made me feel pathetic and mistrustful of the sincerity of his compliments.
“I’m just saying—we don’t know very much. Let go a little bit. It’s possible that if you put your anger out onstage in the right relaxed way—releasing it—the stage will take it from you and heal you. That is possible. It’s just steady as she goes. Maintain ballast. You understand?”
I nodded.
Then, spontaneously, I asked, “Can I tell you one thing?”
“Yes,’’ my director said, taking a step back to better read all of me.
“That wasn’t Samuel’s fault or any of the guys’, Virgil came to everybody’s—” My director cut me off.
“You think I don’t know that? You think I’m playing checkers here? I’m not going to stay up all night trying to convince people the sun’s coming up. The sun will do that all by itself. Sometimes it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong. Samuel fucked up because he didn’t believe in himself. Virgil’s a genius of the stage, flat out, get used to it. And his own demons are crueler then anything you or I could drum up. He will face those monsters any moment now—the second he’s alone. Don’t worry,” J.C. said, smiling. “That’s what I’m trying to say, you’re not in charge.”
I thanked him and turned to go.
“One more thing.” He paused, grabbing my shoulder. “Can you can handle bad reviews?”
“What?”
“The critics,” J.C. said simply, “may not respond to your Hotspur the way that I do, but they will be wrong.”
I stared blankly.
“T
hey will think you are too modern, too funny, too American, and too angry. Most of them love to quote from W. H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare. Auden was a great poet, but he misunderstood this play. Now, I can get you good reviews if that’s what you want—it’s easy. A couple costume changes, omit a few gestures, put your hands in your pockets, and work on your pronunciation of your a’s and your t’s…they are terrible. But, if you do those things, you won’t be nearly as fun. So, think about it. If you can’t live with The New York Times singling you out as the only problem in an otherwise perfect production, then I will give you the tools you need to change. But I hope you will choose to take the bullet for the show, because it’s a lot of fun to watch you.”
“I don’t care about the reviews,” I lied.
“Say it again,” J.C. said to me.
“I don’t care about the reviews.”
“Good.” He laughed. “My advice? Don’t read them. Just, stay alive. Don’t do any drugs. Get some sleep. Only smoke indoors while you are drinking something warm. And do not miss one fucking show.”
He patted me on the back and walked away.
Scene 3
I waited for the 6 train down underneath Broadway. Slowly, Shakespeare slipped away. I shouldn’t have done all that cocaine; that was obvious. It had not helped anything. The aftermath hangover of the coke was catapulting me down into some lower tier of divorcé depression. Stepping off the 6 train and onto the platform, I heard a middle-aged white woman who had been sitting across from me on the subway clearly say out towards me, “The play was terrible, by the way.”
I turned around and looked at her. She smiled. The doors closed.
* * *
—
Walking into the Mercury, I thought, what had I done with that little bag of coke and the small blue pills that came with it? My mom was watching the kids. She was pissed to miss the first preview but she was the only sitter I had. I didn’t want her or the kids to come across the blow. If the hotel cleaning ladies found the baggie, it would be game over. They’d call the cops. The thought petrified me. I imagined the social services taking my kids away. The headline of the Post: drug den dad.