A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  A few days after the heart attack, the stage manager told me King Edward had asked to see me. When I went to him in the hospital, he welcomed me immediately.

  “Well, now my tutelage is complete,” he announced as I stepped into the white antiseptic room.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I taught you to say the most famous line in the theater!” he said.

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Is there a doctor in the house! Now you’re prepared for anything.” He laughed. “Yes, I’m back from the dead, for a moment or two.”

  The space of his hospital room was constant and even, and the air was perfectly still, just like his dressing room.

  “Well, thank you,” I said.

  “Your voice sounds terrible.”

  “What am I going to do about it?” I scratched out to him. “It’s just been getting worse and worse.”

  “First, you have to stop talking so much.” He gestured that I should sit down.

  “I get so scared I’m going to miss a show,” I whispered. “Even now I wake up in the morning and the first thing I think is what if I lose my voice and won’t be able to do the last show with you.”

  He stared at me blankly.

  “Are you familiar with the violinist Michael Rabin?” the King asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “He developed a peculiar phobia of performing. He worried that he would drop his bow. He worried so much that he would drop his bow that he almost could think of nothing else. Constantly drying his hands before each show, he began to be distracted and lose his focus. Nervously obsessing about the temperature in whatever hall he was playing in, he became difficult to work with…” The King paused and looked me up and down. “He couldn’t enjoy his playing anymore. All he could think about was what would happen if he dropped his bow. He imagined the audience would gasp in horror. People would see he was not as in control as he had presented himself…they might ridicule him with laughter. The critics would call him an amateur. If he let it slip and fall, would he even be able to go on? He couldn’t see past the fear of it. His tour progressed and his hands began to sweat more and more profusely. The bow began to be uneasy in his grip like it never had before. He would wake up each morning before a concert in an absolute crisis of anxiety. So, one performance, at the finest hall in Vienna, he told his accompanying musicians that he was going to deliberately drop his bow after a certain section was played. He would let it fall and pick it up and they would start again. On their sheets, they all marked the spot. He did it. He dropped it. The audience gasped. He picked up his bow and played on…And everything was fine. Some even wrote that it was his finest concert. Do you understand? None of them even mentioned the dropped bow.”

  I shook my head; I did not understand.

  “You are so scared of losing your voice that every night you go out there and try to blow it. Your phobia is creating the reality.”

  He leaned forward and whispered in his ancient silky voice, “There is nothing to be afraid of. If you miss a show the world will recover…and so will you. You are letting your fear win. You are not essential to this production. Neither am I. Neither is Virgil. At our best we are contributing significantly but none of us alone are essential. I have seen the understudy rehearsals. Scotty in particular is excellent.”

  He took a sip of Gatorade. “He’s not you. But he is a very good Hotspur. Would you like some?” he asked, gesturing to the pitcher of red Gatorade.

  I nodded.

  “What’s it been like?” I asked. It felt like I was visiting the dead and getting to ask the only real question.

  “What do you mean? Missing shows?”

  I nodded and took a sip. The liquid soothed the tattered corners of my throat.

  “Drop the bow, and next time take a show or two off.”

  He looked at me and knew how hard that would be for me to ever do.

  “You can’t be present at your destination, if you are not present while you’re traveling. You understand?” The King smiled. “Fear is the problem, not your voice.”

  I nodded although I did not understand. Then I asked as quietly as possible, “Fear of what?”

  “I can’t be sure; you probably fear that you are not as strong as you would like us all to believe.” He smirked. “But guess what? We already know.”

  I sat unmoving.

  “I always imagine myself as an eagle,” the King continued. “Sounds silly, but I don’t picture eagles beating themselves up, you know? I try not to twist the present into something it is not. Accept it on its own irrefutable terms.”

  He smiled at me.

  “Don’t be deceived, nothing else is as exciting as what is. The next moment is not greater than the present one. This one right now. All the moments of our life are indestructible. You understand? ‘To be or not to be’ is not whether to kill yourself or not—it’s asking the question, Are you going to be awake and present for your life? Can you see that today is not a bridge to anywhere else?”

  We sat as the King just looked at me. The hospital was noisy with phones ringing, wheelchairs squeaking by, announcements through the intercom.

  “This is why, for me, acting in the theater is such a noble profession. In the attempt to be present onstage we have the opportunity to cultivate our ability to be present in life. Be free of all the illusions and distractions and live in the lucid present. Our lives are composed of the moment-to-moment struggles to be present. We grow in proportion to our ability to live in a true reality. The stage is our platform to develop.”

  I smiled.

  “I know you feel your heart is breaking, you’ve lost your voice, your wife, your family, and you feel you can’t handle it. But don’t worry, our hearts are so resilient. I’ve had two heart attacks. My heart has been smashed to pieces and yet here I am.” He smiled and tried to feel his own pulse. “As our playwright reminds us, ‘Live and love thy misery!’ ”

  He asked me to run lines with him, and we did for over an hour. I had strict orders to go back to the theater and let everyone know that he was not brain damaged and that he was capable of finishing the run. He was only going to return for the final show—he wanted to let Jerome go on as much as possible so that people stopped “feeling happy for him and started missing me.”

  “Never let your understudy go on for only one show. If you miss one, you must miss at least three,” he told me from his hospital bed. “The first performance, every understudy is ‘brilliant.’ They are running on pure adrenaline—and everyone is so grateful the alternate didn’t completely blow it. No, you must let them burn out and become ordinary—then you return to reclaim your role.”

  We split some more Gatorade. He asked me how my marriage was sorting itself out.

  “Ya know, OK,” I answered. “I don’t know why but I’m still kind of hopeful that somehow all this might work out for the best.”

  “Well, you know what I say to that?” Edward laughed. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” He burst out laughing.

  “If I hadn’t lost James,” he continued, “my life would be unblemished. I’ve had two divorces, but ultimately those relationships don’t haunt me…” A darkness moved through his body. “James. That’s a mess.” He took a sip of the bright red drink from his white Styrofoam cup, wiped his chin, and kept his eyes looking straight out the twelfth-story window of Lenox Hill Hospital.

  He told me James, his only son, had committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. Maybe he was manic-depressive. Maybe he was gay and scared to come out. Maybe Edward had been away too much. He didn’t know the answer.

  “I swore to myself when he died,” Edward added, “I would not let this tragedy define me. And I’m proud of that. I’ve moved on. I picked up my feet. I’m not saying I don’t miss him. I’m not saying I don’t shoulder a good part of th
e blame and carry it around with me daily, but I console myself with the fact that there are certainly worse fathers than me. There have been terrible fathers who didn’t have a son commit suicide.”

  An orderly came in to check his vitals. The King paid no attention as his blood pressure and IV were all noted.

  “I should have cared for James better than I did—that’s true, but I can’t do anything about that now. Except try to tell you that the decisions we make matter.” He turned and looked straight at me, his blue eyes deadly clear in the hospital light.

  “Every decision matters. Sometimes time slips by and pages of the calendar just rip off and you can trick yourself into thinking that none of the minutiae, the business of each day, is of any real consequence…or that it’s all predetermined. It’s not. Our actions are the ground we walk on. If you practice Hamlet’s speech to the players, if you practice that speech a lot—when the time comes, you’ll deliver that speech well. If you don’t practice—you will not. Luck is the residue of design. A man makes being there for his son a priority—chances are good that boy’ll turn out safe. You understand me?” He looked at me head-on, the white hospital light hitting his age-spotted face directly. “What I’m saying is, being in a healthy marriage takes two. Being a good father…all that takes is you.”

  * * *

  —

  We were called to stage early that final Sunday, half an hour before fight call, to walk through the King’s more intricate scenes and make sure Edward was comfortable with the blocking. He remembered it all effortlessly and joked through the whole affair. But before he went on for that final performance, I could see he was shaking. He was drinking tea with lemon and sucking on lozenges. His fragility made me love him even more. When he first stepped onstage, his voice was wobbly in a delicate, almost broken, teenage way—then he fell into stride and hit the text as robustly as he always had. By the end, he was magnificent.

  I remembered why I liked his performance so much—he made all of us better. He wasn’t funny the way Jerome was funny—he was the King and let us get the silly jokes. Laughs that I thought were mine, I now realized were ours. The audience was not laughing at my expert delivery, but more at his sideways glance reaction. The entire eighteen performances that he had been gone, I did not get my exit applause at the end of our first scene—I couldn’t figure out why. Then, upon his return, the spontaneous round when Hotspur left the stage happened again. I’m still not sure how he got that for me.

  * * *

  —

  The last show, for me, began in poor form. At fight call, after keeping my temper cool for six months—I lost it. The fight call for Henry IV was long and involved. For a three o’clock matinee, fight call was 2:00 p.m. I never missed one. Lots of guys got casual about it, but I never did, and Prince Hal never did either. Of course, Edward never missed except when he was in the hospital. But Falstaff came only one time, the last. His understudy had walked through fight call for him every performance, and his deliberate absence made me apoplectic. He didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the company.

  On the last day, he showed up in only his jockstrap, leather boots, sword belt, and a Santa hat. Everyone erupted in cascades of friendly, jocular laughter. He looked deliberately preposterous with his giant Santa Claus beard, roly-poly belly, and hairy legs.

  “I’m ready for fight call,” he announced, swinging his sword around dangerously from his groin. And I broke.

  “Listen, motherfucker,” I started out, “I don’t care if you think you’re such a monster-great actor that you don’t ever once have to practice with the rest of us—but don’t mock us. We all found the time to come here eight shows a week. We are the reason nobody got hurt on this show.”

  I held up my knife. “Every night, I thought about sticking this blade right through your fat gut just so I could say, ‘Sorry, old man, if you’d come to fight call once…maybe this could have been avoided.’ ”

  Nobody moved. I was sweating.

  “You’re a fucking leech sucking off our professionalism.” I was proud of that line. I said it to myself a million times.

  “I don’t care that you have made no effort to be friends with any of us. I realize you think God loves you best, but guess what? I DON’T LOVE YOU BEST. I THINK YOU ARE A SELF-CENTERED BLOWHARD. I think you’re a ham and that you take too many pauses, and have no idea how to work with another human being—and frankly, I think you are the worst kind of actor. One who makes others worse.”

  The entire theater was quiet as a mouse.

  Then Virgil very sheepishly said, “I feel like you’re mad at me?”

  And the whole ensemble burst out laughing again. I dropped my sword and missed my first fight call.

  I went back to my dressing room and tried to cool down. My kids were in the wardrobe room. The ladies in there were gracious and let my kids goof around, organizing buttons and playing with the sewing machines. Why had I blown up like that? I didn’t understand myself. I tried to be still. Why was I so mad at Virgil? A lot of it had to do with a stupid article in the Times about what a genius he was. He was on the cover of the Arts section again for closing night and they cited his performance as Falstaff as one of the greatest of the century. It made us all feel a little worthless.

  Ezekiel walked in. He gave me an avuncular pat on the shoulder. In a few more minutes, I thought, I would calm down and apologize. But before I could quiet myself, there was a knock at our door. It was Virgil. He peeked his head in and said with a twinkle, “Are you still a grouchy bear?”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” I yelled. “You don’t make me laugh.”

  He shut the door. Then from the hallway, he delivered a rousing version of Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” speech.

  O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

  She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

  In shape no bigger than an agate-stone,

  On the fore-finger of an alderman…

  He went on and on, running up and down the halls. When he was finished, the entire backstage area filled with applause. Such was life with Virgil Smith. Ezekiel just looked at me and shrugged.

  Finally, I laughed.

  “You know what he’s doing every night when we’re at fight call? He’s warming up his voice like a madman. Think about it, killer. Let’s not waste time being jealous of him. Let’s learn something. It’s possible that if you spent a little more time taking care of your voice, and less time trying to be everyone’s buddy, you’d stop clicking your throat like a lunatic and then someday you could have a private dressing room, just like Falstaff.”

  “I like having a roommate,” I said.

  “I’m just saying, think about it.”

  * * *

  —

  On the mirror, next to all my anonymous quotes and the opening night card from my mother, there was a letter from J.C. It’d come in the middle of the run. I read it before every performance.

  To my tabloid sensation Hotspur,

  I know you’re learning. Keep doing it. It’s obvious you get sleepy every time I mention the Iambic, but the fundamental principle of the iambic pentameter is best expressed in the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth—which is not in four beats as generally supposed, but in two sets of two beats starting with a rest. This creates the five-beat line, which is, simply put, the perfect length to be spoken in one breath. I don’t know why. It just is. Listen to Beethoven’s Fifth before every performance.

  Music is constructed in notes. Language in words. Both are communicating. Music is a language of feeling, the heart. Words are the music of the mind. Theater is their marriage. That’s our job, to make ideas and experience feel like music. A reader can see a question mark: “?” The audience must hear the question mark. Words like “and,” “what,” “but,” “or,” “if” are essential. Nothing is to be thr
own away. There is a world of difference between “…ff t’were done, when tis done.” And, “if it t’were done…”

  When we hear the if—we know we are dealing with the concept of choice.

  Shakespeare could do anything with words. You are not more intelligent than he—so don’t try to fix his writing. Try to understand it. If the language is clumsy or contradictory—consider why? Every word was deliberately chosen. Trust me.

  There are no accidents. Every t and d is essential. Each vowel has a different feeling. Verse or prose? Never a whimsical decision. Consider the climax of Hamlet, not acrobatic verse but humble prose—

  “We defy augury.

  “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come, the readiness is all. Let be.”

  Have a great run,

  J.C.

  I loved the letter. Everything but the bit about the t’s and d’s.

  * * *

  —

  Closing night, as we prepared, Zeke offered up some more of his dime-store philosophy, “Chicks make you feel like—especially as a black dude, let me tell you—chicks make you feel like if you don’t give ’em the best lay of their life, that you are somehow less of a man. Then they also act, simultaneously, as though if you take your cocksmanship to some other lady, that you have somehow failed your better, higher self. They always want it both ways”—he exhaled, as if it was difficult to hold all the world’s most important knowledge in his head alone—“if you let them hold the reins of your life, you wind up in the mud.”