Jack & Louisa: Act 3

by Andrew Keenan-Bolger

  “Yes, we do,” I agreed, grabbing Jack’s laptop off the floor and handing it to him. “We still have three weeks left of rehearsal, so let’s start making a list of ideas.” We’d come too far; sacrifices had been made, actors replaced, precious hours devoted to making something of our own. To walk away from it all because of a few intimidating Bluetooth headsets seemed not only nonsensical, but cowardly. We could still win Ghostlight; we just had to be more strategic.

  Jack hesitated for a split second, then dutifully turned off his phone, turned on his laptop, and opened one of his notebooks to a blank page. Before turning off my own phone, I texted my mom: U & DAD CAN EAT WITHOUT ME. I had a feeling Jack and I wouldn’t be leaving his room for a while.

  “Okay,” said Jack warily, his fingers poised above the keyboard, “start brainstorming.”

  One three-page list, eighty-five Google searches, a quick review of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as told by our social studies textbooks, plus an entire bag of trail mix later, we found ourselves overwhelmed by half-baked, uninspiring ideas.

  The Fantasticks at a carnival?

  “They’ll wonder why we didn’t just do the musical Carnival.”

  The Fantasticks in an insane asylum?

  “They did that with a Sweeney Todd revival.”

  The Fantasticks inside a bottle of “Fantastik” household cleaner?

  “Huh?”

  We were stuck and I hated feeling stuck. There had to be something we could do to make The Fantasticks unique.

  “Ugh,” I groaned, “why is this so hard? Maybe we should let an idea appear to us in our dreams.” I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. The phrase tortured artist suddenly felt very fitting.

  “Let’s zone out for a couple minutes,” Jack suggested. “’Cause right now we’re thinking too hard.”

  “Fine.”

  A bleary-eyed Jack handed me the remote control, then fell back on the floor, draping an arm over his face. I clicked on the television. A rerun of one of those ridiculous reality dating shows was in full swing as a contestant addressed the camera, listing off the qualities he looked for in a girlfriend. As the contestant began to describe himself, boasting about his “romantic side” and his “love of the mountains,” Jack sat up with a jolt, stared hard at the screen, then turned slowly to me.

  “Lou, you’re a genius.”

  Jack

  “IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO be nervous, Jack. But don’t you think this is a little drastic?” Belinda said Sunday morning, resting a purple-painted fingernail on the tip of her chin. “I thought what you were doing was great. The cast seemed happy, and there was a real . . . clarity in your storytelling.”

  I nodded politely, stealing a quick glance at the clock in the back of the auditorium. I still had three minutes left to convince her before our cast would begin shuffling in for the Sunday rehearsal.

  “Right,” I replied. “But we’re never going to beat a hundred other schools with the same boring rendition of The Fantasticks that everyone is used to seeing.”

  “Mm-hmm.” She frowned. “No, I see your point. And honestly, I like it. I think it’s ambitious and it certainly seems like you have a clear vision of what you want.” Belinda shifted her weight. “I just worry that three weeks isn’t a whole lot of time. I mean, we both know how hard it is to change things when you’re in previews on Broadway, but this is a cast of middle-schoolers,” she said, throwing me a playful wink. “They aren’t nearly as quick on their feet as you and me.”

  I looked down at my shoes. I wondered if maybe I should have waited for Lou to arrive before pitching Belinda our great new idea.

  “Look,” she said, dropping her voice. “I know we’ve had our differences, Jack. And I want to make it clear that at the end of the day this is still your show. But as the adult supervisor, I feel it’s my job to make sure you’re not rushing into a decision.”

  I let her words sink in. I thought back to my conversation with Teddy, the awful feeling I had in my stomach once I realized how old-school our old-hat production of The Fantasticks would look next to Cavendish’s ultra-modern take on How to Succeed.

  The moment Lou and I began hatching our new plan, though, that feeling went away, replaced with excitement about telling our story in a way that felt hot on the cultural pulse.

  “Right,” I replied, gathering my strength. “And thank you for being so honest. But I think what’s most important is that we’re able to stand out,” I said confidently, rolling my shoulders back. “And I think this is the way to do it.”

  Belinda peered into my eyes.

  “Well, okay then, Jack.” She smiled genuinely. “In that case, just know that I’m here to support you, so let me know what I can do to help.”

  “Thanks, Belinda,” I replied, just as the first wave of cast members pushed through the steel doors in the back of the auditorium. “I will.”

  “There’s a real parallel between the manufactured realities of The Fantasticks and reality television,” I explained, using the new phrase Lou and I had come up with.

  The entire cast was gathered onstage, listening as I pitched the new vision for our competition piece: The Fantasticks as a reality TV dating show.

  The concept was simple: Matt and Luisa were innocent contestants, unaware that their mothers (two glamorous society women) were scheming to get them together by pretending to hate each other. The character of El Gallo became the smiling, manipulative host, and the Mute became his camera guy, silently filming all of the action. Henry’s and Mortimer’s characters were no longer aging actors but production assistants working on El Gallo’s film crew.

  “The words and music will pretty much stay the same, though we may make some cuts to help support the concept,” I said, finishing the speech. “Are there any questions? I know this is a lot to take in.”

  I looked around the room, watching as my words sank in. Eyes squinted and arms crossed, but no one’s lips moved, leaving an excruciating silence. I glanced over to Lou, whose tight smile indicated that she was just as anxious about the cast’s reaction as I was. Belinda stood off to the side, watching the group with interest and nibbling on the end of her purple gel pen. As I waited for someone to speak up, my mind traveled back to our brainstorming session. Would our midnight idea still hold up in the light of the day?

  Finally, a hand slowly inched into the air. Tanner opened his mouth to speak.

  “So . . .” He knitted his brow. “We’re gonna be on TV?”

  A ripple of laughter broke the stillness, and tension left the room like air out of a balloon. Sebastian snorted loudly and shook his head. “No, stupid, we’re gonna pretend to be on TV.”

  “Oh,” said Tanner, his hand sinking quietly before he shot it up a second time. “So how does that change what we do?”

  “Well,” I began, “the first thing we need to do is get Jenny a camera.”

  Once the cast had moved on to technical questions—Sarah and Esther wanted to know if the scheming society moms were from New Jersey or Orange County—Lou joined me in the front row for a one on one.

  “That went really well!” she exclaimed. “You hit on everything we talked about, and I think the cast is really into it.”

  “I dunno,” I said, shuffling my script and blocking notes. “I feel like there were a lot of confused faces.”

  “They just haven’t heard all of your great ideas,” she assured me. “I promise, once we get everything on its feet, it will all make sense.”

  “Let’s start at the very beginning,” I announced to the room.

  “A very good place to start,” a smattering of voices whispered to themselves.

  “Just like in the old version,” I continued. “We’re going to begin with Tanner singing ‘Try to Remember,’ but this time, we’re going to add Jenny to the scene.”

  I looked over to the wings where Jenny stood, a shoe box tucked under her arm as a stand-in for the camera.

  “Now, Tanner, instead o
f speaking to the audience, I want you to look directly into Jenny’s camera. Think of it like the beginning of a TV show where the host introduces the challenge and contestants.”

  Tanner scooted to his spike mark downstage center.

  “Do you watch any dating shows?” I asked him. “Wife Island? Boy Meets Girls? Wingman, Inc.?”

  Tanner crossed his arms and gave me a withering look.

  “What do you think?”

  “Right . . . ,” I said, nodding my head. “Well, how about . . . a game show? You must watch a couple of those.”

  Tanner shrugged his shoulders. “I guess I like that Trash Titans show.”

  “The one where they build robots out of stuff they find in a landfill and then make them fight each other?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his eyes glazing over as he stared into the middle distance, presumably picturing old microwaves dueling to the death. “So cool.”

  “Perfect!” I said, taking the baton. “So, how does the host of that show talk? Does he have a catchphrase or something?”

  Tanner began to grin, clearing his throat and throwing his head back in a big cartoony motion. “Weeeee-eeelcome back to another episode of Trash Titans,” he said in a corny announcer voice. “I’m your host, Harley Sampson, and it’s time to Build. Those. BOTS!”

  “That’s the voice!” I cheered.

  “Yeah.” Tanner laughed. “My mom says I sound just like him.”

  “No, I mean, that’s the voice,” I said. “The voice I want you to use for El Gallo!”

  “You serious?” He cocked his head.

  “Dead serious. Let’s jump right in.”

  I waved Jenny over and motioned for her to crouch on the floor (which she did, somewhat reluctantly).

  “Now, I want you to point that camera right at Tanner’s face,” I said, stepping back to admire the new stage picture I’d composed. “All right, let’s try this.”

  Mr. Hennessy began playing the intro of the song, and Tanner fixed his gaze into the top corner of the shoe box.

  “Trrrrrrrry to remember the kind of September—”

  As we dove deeper into the script, it was hard not to notice that the cast’s initial skepticism was beginning to thaw. Tanner started playing around with more Harley Sampson affectations, while Jenny began circling around him, changing her angles like a professional camerawoman. Admittedly, sometimes we got to a scene where the concept wasn’t totally clear—

  “Why am I talking about watering vegetables when we’re supposed to be on a soundstage?” Sarah asked as we began the scene with the mothers.

  “Let’s just cut that whole gardening subplot,” I suggested. “Maybe just . . . mime putting on makeup or something.”

  “Do I still fight off El Gallo even though he’s supposed to be the TV host?” Sebastian asked as we moved on to the kidnapping scene.

  “You know, I’m gonna have to get back to you on that one,” I said, flipping through my script. “Let’s skip over that for now, and we’ll circle back later.”

  So I hadn’t answered every question, but it was still the first day.

  “All right, gang,” I said, moving on to the next scene on my worklist. “Let’s take our places for the beginning of ‘Much More.’ And this time, Lou,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out my phone, “let’s try taking some selfies during the chorus.”

  Louisa

  OH, IT HAD SOUNDED LIKE such a great idea in Jack’s bedroom! And for the first week of rehearsals after Jack’s introduction of the reality-show concept, it really did seem like we had come up with something smart—something that could set us apart from the rest of our Ghostlight competitors. A lot of Jack’s ideas worked perfectly, like making Jenny the camerawoman, and turning songs like “Much More” into video testimonials. But by the beginning of the second week, the questions that Jack couldn’t answer still hung in the air, and what was worse—new questions kept popping up.

  “If we’re not supposed to be actors anymore, then why am I still quoting Shakespeare plays?”

  It was Sunday afternoon—we’d be leaving for Ghostlight on Friday—and Raj didn’t realize I could hear him. He and Radhika and I were all standing in the wings, but a long piece of black velour masking (separating me from them) must have made Raj feel like he was having a private conversation. I looked out onto the stage where Jack and Tanner were reviewing “Try to Remember” and held my breath as I listened to Radhika’s response to her brother.

  “It makes no sense,” she said, sounding worried. “And why would Mortimer keep pretending to die if she is just a PA on a television set? What is the purpose?”

  (It seemed like every piece of Jack’s direction was now met with the question Why?, requiring him to spend precious minutes explaining his decisions instead of actually directing.)

  “I don’t know,” Raj said quietly, “but I am starting to think we will look foolish.”

  Upon hearing the word foolish, I winced. As the person who had helped Jack come up with the new idea for the show, I felt a certain responsibility to help my castmates understand that what we were doing would give us an advantage over our competition. The problem was that it was getting harder and harder to defend Jack’s choices, since I, too, was starting to think we might end up looking “foolish.” I could totally make sense of singing “Much More” to a camera. But I had a harder time making sense of Jack’s decision to keep the characters of Luisa and Matt from seeing each other until they sang “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” together toward the end of Act One. Jack kept saying that in order for it to seem like a convincing reality dating show, Luisa and Matt (“the two contestants”) shouldn’t interact at the beginning. But that meant cutting the scene in which the audience gets to see how much they love each other. To me it felt like a dangerous cut to make.

  Still, what could I do? Tell my best friend that the show seemed to be getting worse instead of better? After I had strongly encouraged him to change course? Rather than say anything, I’d just started avoiding Jack as much as I could during rehearsals, for fear of betraying what I really thought.

  “It’s kind of funny, you know?” I suddenly heard Tanner say to Jack, prompting Mr. Hennessy to stop playing. I tried my best to block out Raj and Radhika’s quiet worries on the other side of the masking so I could give my full attention to what was happening onstage.

  “What is?” Jack asked, digging his hands into his pockets. I could tell he was already wary of whatever Tanner was about to say.

  “It’s just,” Tanner continued, “I’m supposed to be this artificial-type host guy now, and none of what’s happening in the story really matters to me, and that’s just funny, ’cause it’s like the complete opposite of what Belinda had me do when I first started.”

  Jack glanced furtively at Belinda, who sat quietly in the fourth row of the auditorium. I knew she’d had serious doubts about Jack’s plans when he first pitched her the reality-show idea, though her concerns mostly had to do with time management. I wondered now if those concerns had grown. Given her complicated history with Jack, though, it was hard to predict whether she would say much to discourage him.

  “Uh, what do you mean?” Jack asked, returning his attention to Tanner.

  “Like all the connecting stuff, y’know? Like when she said to picture singing to someone I know . . . ?”

  I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like Tanner might have glanced in my direction when he said “someone I know.” Maybe I was just hopeful. Either way, I felt a twinge of sadness as I thought back to Tanner’s first time singing the opening number, and how, under Belinda’s patient direction, he had experienced a real breakthrough, allowing himself to be vulnerable onstage. Now that Jack wanted Tanner’s performance to be more superficial, and only about his relationship to the camera/audience, there was no opportunity for him to show any vulnerability at all.

  “Well,” Jack said, doing his best to not sound defensive, “I still want everything that you’re singing to make sense
to you. So, it’s not the ‘complete opposite’ of what Belinda had you do before. But keeping you emotionally detached from the story definitely helps—”

  “—with the concept, yeah, okay,” Tanner interrupted with a wry smile.

  “Exactly,” said Jack, his eyes darting between Tanner, Belinda, and Mr. Hennessy. “So are we cool to move on?”

  By Wednesday Jack had settled on a way to answer the remaining unanswerable questions: Whatever didn’t work, got cut. Not surprisingly this didn’t go over so well.

  “You want to scrap the entire abduction sequence?”

  An hour into rehearsal, after more than half of Raj and Radhika’s first scene had been cut, Jenny’s choreography was next on the chopping block.

  “I want to adjust it,” Jack replied hastily, knowing how hard Jenny had worked on the number. “It’s tricky to have the story set inside a television show and have everyone do these classical ballet moves—it just doesn’t make sense.” Jenny’s clenched jaw must have scared Jack a little, because he added weakly, “You can still have Luisa do a couple ballet moves. But everyone else really should do more contemporary stuff.”

  Before Jenny could even respond, Jack walked over to Sarah and Esther to re-block their newly trimmed scenes, leaving me alone to deal with Jenny’s frustration.

  “First of all, they aren’t classical ballet moves; they’re traditional musical-theater combinations rooted in ballet,” she grumbled, citing her thorough research of musical theater choreography. “Second: ‘contemporary stuff’? Jack knows I don’t do ‘contemporary stuff.’ What does he expect me to come up with when we have, like, no time left? A Beyoncé video?”

  “Don’t stress about it too much, Jenny,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. “You just have to change some of your choreography—”

  “Lou, please—we’re not changing anything, we’re just getting rid of it.”

  “But what we’re doing instead really will work better with the concept.”