by Ethan Hawke
* * *
—
My letter reading is interrupted by Lady Percy dressed in a nightgown.
O, my good lord, why are you thus alone?
For what offense have I this fortnight been
A banish’d woman from my Harry’s bed?
She is scared and explains that I talk in my sleep of iron wars, bounding steeds, basilisks, cannons, prisoners’ ransom. I’m not eating well. She bats her eyelashes, gently caresses the scars on my belly, and tells me I haven’t made love to her in weeks. I’ve given over “to thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy.” Goddamn it to hell she’s beautiful. I throw her in the hay. She’ll get what she’s asking for. She laughs, playfully grabs my pecker through the thick black leather, saying she will break my “little finger” if I don’t tell her the plan and what’s in this letter I am hiding. I explain that she cannot reveal what she doesn’t know. This secrecy is for her safety. She doesn’t like this answer. She gets on her knees and plays with my belt. We get hot and heavy in the hay—until it’s too hot, for Hotspur, and I race to the barn door. It’s time for war. Besides, women can’t be trusted.
I explain to her,
Love! I love thee not,
I care not for thee, Kate this is no world
To play with mammets and to tilt with lips.
We must have bloody noses and crack’d crowns.
She’s crushed and answers so quietly. I never knew how she did it. It was like the soft pedal on a concert Steinway. She could speak so quietly and yet her voice could be heard in Connecticut.
Do you not love me? Do you not, indeed?
Well, do not then; for since you love me not,
I will not love myself.
This woman was a magnificent actor. Lady Percy stares back fierce. She is true blue. The best friend I’ve ever had.
I can’t leave her like this. Striking a softer stance,
Hark you, Kate.
Whither I go, thither shall you go too;
Today will I set forth, tomorrow you.
Before I stepped offstage after Act 2, scene 3, on opening night, I stood in the doorway and with a clenched fist blew her a kiss goodbye. I left her waiting; her hair and nightdress sprinkled with hay. The lights faded down to focus on a close-up of her face, then black, and the whole hall shook in applause. My body buzzed as if I had just survived a motorcycle accident. I hid, as I always did, in a dark spot by the ropes on the stage left wall, kneeled and collected myself. Four minutes until my next entrance. During the following scene change I heard soft weeping by the stage left exit. It was my Lady Percy. I stood up and walked over to her.
“You OK?”
She just stumbled forward around all the ropes. “Get the fuck away from me.”
“What’s going on?”
“You can’t do that,” she snapped, turning to me, her eyes burning and tears streaming down her face. “You can’t grab me like that. I have bruises on my arms. You can’t pull me around the stage like that.”
“Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was doing that.”
“We fucking make out every night. You paw my ass, push me around, and roll me over, and you don’t know it hurts?”
“I really didn’t. And I’m so sorry. I’m just in love with the work we are doing and I thought you were too.”
She punched me hard with both fists and pushed me against the wall.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I love acting with you. I didn’t understand. I’ll do better.”
She pulled me close and jammed her soft wet delicious tongue into my mouth like a woman who hadn’t seen her lover in ten years. Wrapping her arms around me, she breathed me in. She slid her hand down over my sweaty leather pants and held my swelling dick with her fragile thin white hand, and whispered, “I’m falling in love with you. I mean, I know it’s not you. It’s the stupid play, but I worry about you night and day. This always happens to me and I’m too old for this shit. I can’t wait till we close and I don’t ever have to see you again. But just fuck me one time, will you please? Can we get a hotel room or something so you can let me put your dick in my mouth? I want to feel you come inside me so badly it’s like I can’t breathe until I do.”
My cue light went on.
“Please be safe,” she said, pulling her hand away from my pants. And kissed me goodbye.
Completely unsure if we were still acting, or had ever stopped, I charged into battle.
* * *
—
what seemed like seconds later, I bellowed, with every bit of vitality I could muster, blood literally spewing from my mouth:
O, Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!
The whole fight had been “off” since the first cue. The fight director had warned us to be extra-slow tonight. He knew everybody’s nerves would be both frazzled and jacked for opening. We tried to listen to him, but it didn’t matter. When we picked up our blades and charged out, with the cannon fire roaring and ripping in our ears, I leapt up onto an old artillery wagon, spinning my dagger in one hand and my sword in the other. (J.C. thought this an unnecessary show-off move. He was worried one of the blades would fly out of my hands and spear an audience member, but I did it anyway.) I screamed my call to battle:
DIE ALL, DIE MERRILY!
I knew then I was totally out of control. It wasn’t Hal’s fault; the whole fight was just wrong, and right before I was supposed to get the lance in the gut, I stepped too far forward and the lance gouged me hard in the lower abdomen and then sprang up and forcefully slapped me under the chin. The house gasped. Blood went splattering across the oak planks of the stage and dripped down my armor. Prince Hal recovered and thrust again, this time placing the retractable lance into my chest plate as planned, and we continued. With the pain shooting through my face, the speech finally worked.
“I better brook the loss of brittle life than those proud titles thou hast won of me; they wound my thoughts worse than sword my flesh,” I said calmly.
I didn’t have to imagine the pain: the whole left side of my face was pummeled and throbbing. I didn’t have to fake swallowing blood—I swallowed it. Much better.
“O, I could prophesy,” I said with my gloved hands still holding the lance firmly in my belly, my whole body instinctively shaking, like chattering teeth, “but that the earthy and cold hand of death lies on my tongue.”
I didn’t have to pretend it was difficult to talk. It damn well was difficult. I wasn’t sure how bad the wound was, but it felt like I might need to go to the hospital. I gathered my unraveling intestines for the final sentence:
No, Percy, thou art dust, and food for…
I gagged and the blood in the back of my throat gurgled and poured out my mouth.
It was freakin’ awesome. I actually couldn’t finish the line, just as our author had designed.
“For worms, brave Percy,” the Prince said, holding me in his arms and finishing my sentence, “fare thee well, great heart.”
I lay there trying to breathe slowly, in long even inhales and exhales, so my armor didn’t heave up and down. It kills the suspension of disbelief when you see a bunch of dead soldiers sprawled all over the ground, huffing and heaving for breath as the battle ends. Shakespeare has many inherent challenges, and having the dialogue continue around a battalion of “dead” actor-soldiers is one of them.
Damn, I said to myself, I’ll never do that speech that well again.
* * *
—
“You know how Olivier played that speech, right?” Edward, our King, asked me later in his dressing room.
I shook my head. I was sitting, still in costume, eating an ice cream sandwich in the right side
of my mouth while I iced the left side of my face. Edward was drinking a glass of red wine. His dressing room was wonderful and still. His drink matched his robes. The King’s old face was calm and placid. He sat at his dressing table while I hunkered down on his cot in the corner. It was a special privilege granted to me this night to be invited in for his post show glass of wine. The play was still marching on, we could hear Prince Hal’s coronation over the monitor, but our roles were done. We were both dead. We were just waiting to take our bow.
“Olivier built the whole character around Hotspur’s inability to finish that last word, ‘worms.’ He gave Hotspur an actual stutter. He went through the text and stuttered on every syllable beginning with w or r. So, when he got to ‘food for w…w…w…’ the audience was right where he wanted them, before he fell down dead…” the King trailed off remembering the performance. “Jesus, it was heartbreaking. Truly incredible.”
“Fuck, that’s brilliant,” I said, taking the ice away from my face for a moment.
“It was. Greatest stage death I’ve ever seen. Only time I ever believed a death. He was astounding that way…Even when he exited the stage, you actually could see where his character was going. The power of his imagination was contagious…exceptional.”
“Why did you wait until now to tell me that?” I asked, pressing the ice back to my mouth, wondering what I could do to make my death more believable.
“Because you would’ve been tempted to steal the idea. And you mustn’t. You must create your own Hotspur.”
“Were you in that production?”
“No. I was in Olivier’s second Hamlet—Laertes. I was terrible. But I wasn’t in that production of Henry. Gielgud was Hal. Christ, he was even better then Olivier.”
“I would’ve liked to have seen that.”
“Yes, but if you had, you’d be old like me. And that is depressing.”
Just then my understudy poked his head into Edward’s dressing room.
“Great show, boys, really killer.”
We both nodded thank you.
“Is your mouth OK?” he asked.
“It’s fine,” I mumbled.
“You took a shot,” he said, and walked on.
“That guy makes my skin crawl,” I mumbled.
“Scotty? Really? Why?” the King asked.
“I hear him running my lines in the stairwell. I watch him shadowing me. I feel like he’s waiting for me to die.”
“He’s doing his job. And remember, they are not your lines any more than they were Olivier’s.”
I nodded and carefully took another bite of my ice cream sandwich. There was a vending machine in the basement and every night, after I died, I collected four quarters from my desk and treated myself. One of the secret blessings of my divorce was I could eat whatever I wanted and still be rail-thin.
“It’ll be nice to have this opening behind us,” Edward said calmly.
“Do you think it’ll go over well?” I asked, carefully chewing the ice cream sandwich with the right side of my mouth.
“The show? The notices? What do you mean?”
“Both, I guess.”
The King took a moment and then said slowly, “The show is brilliant. There’s no way it won’t be beautifully reviewed.”
“I like your confidence,” I said.
“It’s not confidence. It’s experience. I have been in bad shows. I’ve been in controversial shows. This is not one of them.”
“J.C. seemed worried tonight,” I said, hoping Edward might gossip with me a little.
“Not worried,” Edward answered. “Upset. As good as this show is, it could’ve been better.”
“Really?” I asked.
He went on to tell me about the last time he and J.C. had done this play, at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The production was far more stylized and radical. Ultimately, the direction of the New York production, Edward said, was far superior. It was just that the Chicago Falstaff had the stuff of legend.
“Better than Virgil Smith?” I asked incredulously. I thought Virgil was a diva—but he was glorious onstage.
“You overvalue celebrity,” Edward said to me. “You are impressed by all the ancillary elements: the pizzazz that surrounds Virgil. And there is pizzazz—I’m not saying the sparkle and shine isn’t there—I’m just not overly impressed. Glamour is good onstage; it’s true. Virgil is a star, but Charlie Maugham of Chicago is Falstaff. He channeled the real pain of being an addict, of being lonely, of being a giant fat person. I loved Charlie’s Falstaff, and J.C. loved it more than anyone. Do you know Charlie’s work?” Edward asked me.
I didn’t.
Over the monitor we heard the Prince, who was now the new King, say to his old friend, Falstaff, “I know thee not, old man,” and then the final music of the play began. You could feel the intensity of the betrayal even over the intercom. We had about four minutes till curtain.
“Charlie is the reason J.C. wanted to direct the show in the first place. He built the whole thing around him. But in New York they needed a star. J.C. did everything he could to keep Charlie, but once Virgil expressed interest it was fait accompli.”
The King slowly took a sip of his wine. The crossword was his preshow warm-up, “to get the motor running,” and the wine was the postshow wind-down, “to be able to sleep.”
“I realize,” he continued, his diction perfect, “Virgil will win awards for this part and he is a wonderful actor. But Charlie is pure. He wasn’t acting onstage; he could live up there—he didn’t need a fat suit—he was fat—and he had all the discipline of the great theater actors.” The King smiled mischievously. “Meaning that he knew the verse so well and the rhythms of this play so intrinsically that it didn’t matter how drunk he was—he could still leave the whole house weeping and have the final curtain come down twelve minutes faster than Mister Virgil—Pause—Aren’t I amazing—Pause—Smith. But the Broadway producers felt they couldn’t sell out this expensive a show without a big name, so Charlie was out until tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the glutton that Charlie is—he bought seats for tonight’s show. He’s so fat he needs two. He wanted to come to opening night so it could hurt as much as possible. He came this afternoon to the box office to pick up his tickets absolutely stumbling drunk. J.C. happened to be walking through the lobby and Charlie started screaming, ‘I KNOW THEE NOT, OLD MAN.’ And charged J.C. After the security guards brought Charlie down to the ground, they couldn’t get him out of the building: he weighs a massive three hundred and fifty pounds. Despite a bloody nose, J.C. helped Charlie up and offered to take him out for a drink. Charlie said, no, that he was leaving, and abruptly walked through the glass doors without opening them. The glass shattered. It was a scene.” The King smiled a sad, knowing smile. “As I said, the stuff of legend. So, you see, J.C. had reasons to be upset.”
“What happened to Charlie after that?” I asked, finishing my ice cream sandwich.
“He walked away. Simple as that. My bet is, the true Falstaff sits in a drunk tank at this very moment. And the producers spent the afternoon rushing in new glass.”
“PLACES FOR CURTAIN CALL,” the stage manager announced over the speaker system.
“Let’s bow,” Edward said with a wink and stood up. “Perhaps you know now why J.C. felt the need to humiliate Virgil by not letting him take the final bow. Ridiculous.”
“Well, I think you should bow last,” I said. Then, motioning to his beautiful silk flowing gown, I added, “With robes like those, you have to.”
“Hmmm.” He nodded appreciatively. “They made this costume for me. When I was younger I would’ve wanted the real thing. Some actual old found fabric from the sixteen hundreds because it would have ‘character.’ But now that I am old, I like my clothes to
be new, because I have character.”
He smiled and walked out.
I adjusted my armor and followed the King down the hall to our stage left entrance.
“Fame is a ‘Black Death,’ ’’ Edward whispered to me as we walked the corridor, past the other dressing rooms. “We like to watch people die. So we put them on magazines and fan the flames of their egos until they actually catch fire and explode. The zeitgeist is trying to do it to you right now.” He kept walking in long slow strides until we hit the staircase. “And you may mistakenly think that’s exciting, or be secretly flattered, or think that it’s happening to you because you are important or interesting. But you’re not—it’s just that you have caught the disease and it’s fun to watch you rot.” He smiled and we both stepped into the darkness of the backstage area.
“I mean this in the kindest way possible,” he continued, whispering even more quietly now. “I believe in you. I think you are doing an excellent job with a very difficult role and that if you were to quit smoking and apply yourself fully to the art of acting, you could have a great life in the theater and make serious art. But there are traps all around you; it doesn’t take a psychic to see them. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see that, most likely, you will die of the Black Death.”