by Ethan Hawke
“So it’s OK to find someone funny, you just can’t laugh?” When he said that, he noticed his own eyes in the mirror. He hadn’t yet put on his eyeliner. Frantically, he reached for his makeup. If a cool customer like Zeke was this nervous I couldn’t imagine how the rest of us would make it.
Ezekiel had theories about stage makeup and believed it was important, especially for a black guy, to use this peculiar blue eyeliner. It worked. From ten feet away, it made his eyes look like a panther’s. I lay down on the floor and started doing my fifty push-ups. I always do that at the ten-minute mark. Then I put on the rest of my costume. Soon, Samuel would knock and it would be time to dip ourselves in blood.
I started filling my pockets with talismans, small trinkets that would bring me deeper into my imagination. I had a few old prop coins, scraps of paper, a lucky piece of wolf fur—little shit I’d imbued with meaning for my character so that when I was onstage and stuck my hands in my pockets there would be something real there; something that let me know I wasn’t wearing a costume.
My real pants were tossed on the floor. I looked at them for a second and wondered what was in my pockets and what did it say about my character.
“FOLKS,” the stage manager announced over the loudspeaker. “THEY ARE HAVING A TOUGH TIME OUT THERE GETTING EVERYONE SEATED. SO, IT’S STILL TEN MINUTES. TEN MINUTES TILL CURTAIN.”
You could hear the audience. They were extremely loud and impatient over the monitor. Opening night houses are full of people who know each other and it’s quite common to start late.
My mind was oddly focused on one thing: Would my wife be in the house? She’d just told me that afternoon that she was in love with someone else, but when I’d called the house later to say good night to the kids, my daughter told me, “Mommy’s going out tonight. She’s going to a show.” And while most likely she was on a date with the fashion mogul, or whatever he was, I still somehow thought, Maybe she’ll be at my opening. Maybe she forgot to tell me she loved me. What would I say to her if she came backstage? Maybe we’d fuck in the darkness behind the soda machines.
I was good in this play and I looked killer in all this black leather. I imagined banging her with my armor on. What would happen then? Would she move into the Mercury? Fuck no, she detested that place. Would I go home? God, I didn’t want to…I couldn’t breathe in her house—all the nannies and cleaning ladies and hairdressers, that little, loathsome, hairless cat. Oh God. But I did want to fuck her in my chain mail by the soda machines. I could picture it clearly. Her evening gown hiked around her waist. She would look good. She always did.
Ezekiel leapt from his chair and stomped his feet.
“AHHH, fuck, I’m nervous. I’m forty-eight goddarn years old. Why am I so nervous?” He took a deep breath and stretched down to touch his toes. Then he said, “Give me one of them cigarettes.”
“You don’t smoke,” I said.
“Fuck you. You don’t know anything about me. Give me one of those white boy cigarettes.”
I did and he went and stood on the commode. He had trouble lighting the thing. I stood up and switched on the fan for him and lit his cigarette.
My wife wasn’t going to come. It was an absurd idea. She hates the theater. She loathes Shakespeare. What was I thinking? But maybe…She did love me once.
Suddenly I could not remember my first line.
My stomach flipped. I couldn’t even find the breath to check my voice.
“Can I open your script?” I asked Ezekiel. His script was so much better organized than mine.
“Are your hands clean?”
“Yes.” I scowled.
“Just wash ’em, will ya? God knows where your hands have been.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said and walked into the bathroom. I stood underneath him and washed my hands and dried them. He was blowing the smoke straight up into the vent just as I had.
As I flipped the pages of Ezekiel’s script, I could see that in the margins of every page, he had written long passages of his “inner monologue”—things he imagined his character was thinking about while other people were talking. Ideas that would lead and inform his next line. I found my first line. “My liege, I did deny no prisoners.” How could I not remember that?
“Shit, man, I should be playing fucking Falstaff.” He jumped off the toilet and flushed his cigarette and started waving the door open and closed to try and dissipate the smoke.
“Did you see the article on Virgil on the cover of The New York Times Magazine? ‘The Most Underrated Actor in America!’ The motherfucker is playing Falstaff on Broadway with an Oscar over the fireplace at home, and he’s the most underrated actor in America? What am I then, huh? My son reads that article—‘Hey, Dad. How come they didn’t even mention you or have your picture in the paper? Huh? You must have a really small part.’ And then J.C., with his speeches….‘We’re all integral!’ ” He shook his head with an inscrutable expression. “It’s hard to be a man. Fuckin’ hard.” He shut the bathroom door and sat back down. Took his script from my hands and made sure it hadn’t been soiled in any way.
“CAN WE FIRE THIS FUCKING ROCKET!” he screamed. “I can’t breathe back here!” He shouted out so loud his voice boomed through the halls. You could hear an explosion of applause from the rest of the cast inside their dressing rooms.
“I’m serious, bro, I can’t goddamn breathe, I’m so nervous,” he said quietly to me. “How the hell am I supposed to have the show of my life with those two women out there trying to ruin it?”
“Are they both going to come back here after?” I asked, imagining all of us in this tight space—what we would talk about?
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said, biting his nails.
“You think the reviews will be good?” I asked.
A silence hit the room.
“Oh God, I hope so. I know I should be beyond it…but I need one. My family needs that review. Just one time, if just once The New York Times could say—without qualifying—that I can act…It’d just help everybody in my family be proud of me and believe that I am living my life in a meaningful way. It would really help.” He looked ten years old.
“Can I ask you a favor?” I said. I’d been waiting to bring this up.
“Yeah, man, what’s up?”
“I’m not going to read the reviews.” The words flowed out of me. “I’ve promised myself. I just have to not think like they do. I hate myself enough already and there’s just been so much crap about me in the papers, on the Internet, and Entertainment Tonight, all that shit. I’ve been finding that the less I know, the better. None of it’s real, right? And they’re not going to say I’m the reincarnation of Montgomery Clift and that is the only thing that would be good enough. I love this play and this production so much, I just can’t bear to think of someone writing anything nasty about it, so I’m just going to live in blissful ignorance, OK? Can you help me? I don’t want to talk about them at all, OK? I know it’ll be hard at first, but after, like, two shows, it won’t matter. So can you help me?”
“Done and done,” he said, “but let me say this: The review in my head says Monty Clift couldn’t wipe your ass. He was no father. He wasn’t half the man you are, or the actor. OK? No shit. This dressing room is pure, one hundred percent rock ’n’ roll. Me and you, kid. Our scene out there is flamethrower-hot and everyone knows it.”
We did have a good scene just before the Act 3 battle. It was easy and fun, like setting a handful of pine needles on fire. Ezekiel would never let us run lines even though I always wanted to.
“Makes you soft,” he would say. “I don’t want to know what you’re going to do. I want you to surprise me. I don’t want the audience to get some reheated performance of something we did great in the dressing room. Go run lines with your drama coach,” he would say
, swaggering around, pumping himself up. And he was right. Our scene was my favorite five minutes of every day.
“THE MOMENT HAS ARRIVED,” the stage manager said finally. “PLACES PLEASE.”
Samuel knocked on our door. He held my sword in one hand and his own in the other. “Let’s go get bloody.” He smiled. And it was on. I slipped the final blue pill in my mouth and swallowed it dry.
When I step onstage I enter a pocket in time where there is nowhere else I want to be. There are no phone calls to be made; no unanswered emails; there’s no late fee from the kids’ library; the errand left undone is meaningless. All that matters is: Now.
The first act or so was effortless. The play was carrying us all.
* * *
—
Act 2, scene 3, came faster than usual. I was standing on a three-foot-by-three-foot platform about fifty feet up in the air. It was the top of a staircase that rolled onto center stage from the stage right wing. The whole moving piece was made of thick cuts of oak. The wood calmed me. During the previous scene, I had to silently climb up the ladder in the dark. Once there, I was given a torch by Dave, our prop master. He handled all fire code safety issues. He lit the thing with a blowtorch, gave me a salute, and climbed down. I would stand up, hold the fire, and try to get centered before the stage lights would go entirely black. With the blackout, this giant staircase would be wheeled out, leaving my torch as the only light in the theater. J.C. had managed to sidestep the law to get even the exit signs in the back of the theater blacked out for this scene change. I was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only my scars and black leather pants. Never in my life had I been so goddamn skinny.
This scene was, in many ways, the most difficult I had to do each night. It required a subtlety and restraint that are not my strong suits and was the opposite of almost every other blistering scene in which Hotspur appears. As I rolled onto stage, I would white-knuckle the handle that had been installed for my security. Falling would not be a great way to start the scene. I had assured and reassured J.C. that I felt comfortable up there—but I said that just to be cool. When it moved, the damn thing terrified me.
In Act 2, scene 3, we find Hotspur up in the middle of the night; he can’t sleep. He is poring over a letter from a “friend” informing him that this friend finds Hotspur’s plans to stage a violent coup foolhardy. The letter is unnerving to Hotspur and he is desperate to understand it or, at least, to toss it off. What makes the scene so precarious to play is that there is a long period onstage where he is by himself with no obvious drama. Just a man, a warrior, who can’t sleep, reading a letter over and over—quoting it back to himself, trying to decide what to think. Is this a bad omen? Obviously, Hotspur had written this “friend” first, looking for solidarity and more troops. His request is being denied and now he must worry that this once hoped-for accomplice will spill Hotspur’s rebellious plans and foil the element of surprise.
No wonder he can’t sleep.
Another big hurdle of the scene is that it begins with a monologue where Hotspur is conversing with himself. Often, when a Shakespearean character is alone onstage, the ensuing monologue will be a direct address—but not so with this speech. Hotspur is supposed to be essentially mumbling to himself, and this asks for a level of naturalism that is difficult given the stylized nature of the prose.
But then there is the biggest hurdle of the scene: I must be in front of twelve hundred people shirtless, holding a long piece of parchment paper in one hand and lighting my face with a torch in the other. The problem may not be obvious. But if you hold a piece of paper with one hand in front of twelve hundred people with your shirt off on opening night of a Broadway play it is incredibly fucking difficult for your hand not to shake. The slightest tremor in your fingers gets that paper rattling, and then no one is thinking, What a great actor! What an interesting scene! What beautiful dialogue! They are thinking, What is that half-naked man so nervous about? Isn’t he a professional actor? Why are his hands shaking? Is he the one who fucked that bookshop owner in South Africa and broke Mary Marquis’s heart? And once you start worrying about your hand shaking, the problem grows legs.
You’d think that after my having been a professional actor for fifteen years, this would not be among my top concerns. You’d be wrong. People always ask about “all those lines! Isn’t it hard to memorize all those lines?” Memorization only takes time. Using the power of your ensemble’s collective imagination to make the audience forget about their sister’s chemotherapy and care about the actions of people speaking in verse who lived six hundred years ago—that takes something mystical; and if your hands start shaking like you’re doing a high school oral book report, Dionysus sure as shit ain’t going to show up.
There’s only one way to beat it. Dive into your imagination. It must be the middle of the night; you must feel the hay on your bare feet; you must smell the horses, hear the wood owl, feel the coming morning humidity on your skin. You must picture the face of that cross-eyed, goose-livered friend who wrote you this letter. You must remember how much you loathe the King. The patronizing bastard deserves to die. He had your father killed, for Christ’s sake. You loved your father. You must remember exactly the letter you wrote this friend. You must have actually written it. You must fully imagine the conversation you had with your uncle debating the wisdom of approaching this alleged friend in the first place. You were all for it. Your uncle warned you. What’s your uncle going to say now? No wonder you can’t sleep. You’re smart not to sleep. Your hands should be shaking!
And, in some sly way—and this is where it all gets mystic and strange—you can’t even pretend you don’t notice the audience. This is where the truth lives. They’re there; you can even make out a few faces in the front row. You can’t ignore them. You must find a way to incorporate these eyes into your understanding of Hotspur’s reality. They are the watchful eyes of God.
You walk onstage and say, “Hello, God. I know that you see everything. You hear the meditation of my heart. You make sense of my every gesture.”
And you must breathe. Even the big Russian dog himself, Stanislavsky, had to make a friend of his fear; even the Queen’s knight, Sir John Gielgud, had to do the same. It’s the only way to connect yourself with the shadows swimming around you.
I remember once riding my bike when I was thirteen with my dog leashed to my hand running alongside me. The dog and I were racing down Old Trunk Road towards the train station. The dog saw a squirrel. I, too, saw the squirrel. From the moment of making eye contact with the squirrel, it was probably a mere three seconds later when I stood up with half my face left bloody on the pavement: I flew through the air, cursed my dog, tried to get my hands untangled from the leash, watched the gravel come towards me, and wondered how much it would hurt. It seemed like an hour. Time moves like that onstage. There are moments inside moments.
I gripped the handle tightly as the whole oak apparatus was rolling towards its final mark, my mind attempting to completely submerge itself. Once the massive stairway stopped and I could feel it lock into place, I let go of the handle and pulled the letter out of my pants. My cue light went black and I began my descent. That night, I imagined that Valentino Calvino, the fashion stud who was fucking my wife, wrote the letter. That would get my blood up. That’s the trick for me—what I always try to do anyway—just start blurring the lines between the character and me. I read the letter until I stepped off the stairs onto the stage; then I read it again. The silence in the theater was thundering, but I would resist and not speak until I didn’t notice the silence at all. J.C. had told me that in rehearsal: “Take all the time in the world. Don’t start till you’re centered. Wait till you see the whites of their proverbial silence. You have us, just hold us…” Then he added with a smile, “Just don’t take too long.”
“But for mine own part, my lord, I could be well contented to be there, in respect
of the love I bear your house.”
My voice was strong. Even in a whisper, I could feel the whole house listening. I sucked the air deep into my belly one more time, looked up, and continued talking to myself. They were a good house—I knew it immediately.
“He could be contented? Why is he not, then?”
Boom, a huge laugh. I can’t explain what was funny, it wasn’t anything I was doing. It’s the setup. It’s the playwright at work. I could blow the line, for sure, and often would, but when I was in the thick of the play and transmitting correctly, there were so many laughs to be mined. The feeling of making a house laugh with a four-hundred-year-old joke is like skipping a rock seventeen times across a still lake.
“In respect of the love he bears our house?” I mocked the numskull that sent me this cowardly letter: “He shows in this, he loves his own barn better than he loves our house.” Here, generally, I would pause and shake out my anger. Sometimes, I would freeze as if maybe I heard someone else in the barn and then realize it was just that old wood owl. I tried to let the letter wash over me fresh every night and have no real plan as to how I would approach it other than a few simple fence post ideas to lean on.
First, as I said, I’d start reading out loud only when I was fully composed. Second, I’d set the torch into its holder about five lines in, giving me the opportunity to hold the paper with the other hand just in case the first hand was beginning to shake.
Once the torch was set, I would continue:
“Let me see some more…,” I said on opening night, with both hands now firmly, confidently on the paper. “ ‘The purpose you undertake is dangerous;’—why, that’s certain! ‘ ’Tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’ ”
Here I would often crumple the letter and throw it. And with that action, sometimes—often, hopefully—I would disappear. Even my breath would no longer be my own. It was drawn from the audience. I could feel them around me like a great cloud of witnesses filling me up. There is a quiet place, a room inside my guts where my head and my heart meet, where bad news is understood before it’s spoken, where I am conscious even when I’m asleep, where my dreams are remembered. A room I could access easily in the immense boredom of childhood, staring out the window of my bus going to school; watching the headlights move across my boyhood ceiling late at night as I tried to fall asleep; picking at my food as the adults talked about their jobs. Inside this room in my guts, I imagine a small red-hot fragment of rock. No magic stone unique to me—it’s the same thing that’s inside a dog, a deer, a porcupine, a maple tree—it goes mostly unobserved—but onstage, if I can breathe right, and the audience will let me, the embers in my gut can swell and spark into a flame. That, to me, is performing. It is a peace I have never felt inside the inertia of daily life.