Her question seemed to take Alan by surprise, for he replied immediately, “No one”—and then, as if suddenly remembering their conversation from earlier that week, he added, “A couple people from my book group are coming, but they decided to take their own cars. It wasn’t that convenient to go together.”
His answer increased Amanda’s awkwardness, but she fought against it, trying hard to summon that sense of ease that she had always imagined would exist between them if they were alone together. Alan, too, seemed to notice her discomfort; once traffic began to flow more easily as they reached the wider, suburban boulevards, he said, “I’m sorry if I seem a bit tense. I always am before an opening.”
“Oh—that’s okay. I understand.”
“I just can’t tell you how much I appreciate it that you could come. It’s a big night for me. Lisa—well …” He let the sentence trail off as if it were too much to explain. When he resumed, an edge of bitterness had crept into his voice. “I suppose I should feel lucky in my position. I mean, a lot of artists would appreciate the support of someone like her. It’s just that—” He shook his head, dismissing the remainder of his thought.
“It’s just what?”
He paused. “It’s just that I never feel she takes my work as seriously as I take hers. There—I said it. The law, that’s a career, but writing plays—that’s a hobby.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“I know you do.”
Alan slowed as they came abreast of a driveway leading to what looked like an apartment complex set back from the busy road. There were three or four stumpy gray buildings that jutted into the flat skyline like broken teeth. Alan turned into a vast parking lot and began driving up and down the rows, hunting for a spot.
“Where are we?” Amanda asked.
“A seniors’ home.”
“Where’s the theater?”
“Inside the main building. There’s an auditorium.” Alan seemed slightly embarrassed.
“But is it open to the public?”
“Yeah. The home allows us to sell tickets to outsiders—basically to cover our production costs—but the residents watch it for free.”
“I don’t get it,” Amanda said. “How does the play … find a wider audience?”
“We book the play wherever we can at this phase. Then, when word gets out, you hope for one of the bigger stages to take it—the Virginia Repertory Theater in Chantilly or the Outer Circle at Gaithersburg—that one’s very highly regarded.
“We open next month at the Bethesda JCC.”
“There’s one.” Amanda pointed to a gap between cars.
“No—it says residents only. We have to use the visitors’.”
Alan continued to drive up and down like a farmer plowing a field; finally a car signaled it was pulling out. The spot was a long walk from the entrance to the main building. By the time they reached the double set of glass doors, which swung open automatically to allow the passage of wheelchairs, Amanda’s hair was sticking to the back of her neck. Inside, the air was at least cooler, but it felt stagnant and recycled; the odor of whatever they were cooking in the cafeteria—boiled potatoes, to Amanda’s nose—was laden with a heavy dose of disinfectant.
Alan approached a surly-looking receptionist who sat behind a fortified pane of glass.
“We’re here for the production of American Stigmata.”
The receptionist leaned forward to speak into a microphone. “Who?” her voice echoed.
“It’s not a person, it’s a play. American Stigmata. I’m the play-wright.”
The receptionist scanned a clipboard although she did not appear certain of what she was looking for. After a few moments she shoved the clipboard through a slot under the glass and asked Alan if he could find what he wanted. He found it quickly and pointed it out to her.
“You see here? American Stigmata, a play. It’s in the ‘MacArthur Room.’”
She nodded, uninterested, and took the clipboard back.
“You’ll be getting more people coming through here asking for it. You can just send them there, okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jesus,” he muttered as they walked away. “I hope we’re the first ones.”
There was no worry on that front. When they arrived, the room was empty, except for about a hundred or so banquet chairs lined up to face an accordion wall. It was not the auditorium Amanda had expected, but a large reception room the residents might use for birthday parties and other types of social events. The walls were covered in a worn pink paper with patterns of raised velvet that reminded Amanda vaguely of eczema; coffee cups and an unplugged electric urn had been set out on a long banquet table to one side. Amanda could not see where the production would take place, unless the accordion wall was going to double as a curtain. That hypothesis seemed to be correct, for shortly after they entered they heard the sound of voices coming from behind the partition.
“That should be the cast,” Alan said, looking about. “I better go check.”
Amanda sat down in one of the chairs toward the back of the room and glanced at her watch. The play was due to start in less than half an hour. They had passed a sign in the corridor listing the evening’s events—aside from Alan’s play, there was bingo and a ballroom-dancing lesson.
Alan returned to report that the actors were all assembled and changing into their costumes. He was twittery with anxiety, like a dinner party hostess. He paced back and forth at the front of the room, running his fingers through his hair and pausing every few minutes to check the corridor.
“They said there would be someone here to take tickets,” he muttered at one point.
“Do the residents need tickets?”
“No, but outsiders do. My impression was that they had sold quite a number of them …”
One of the actors poked his head out. He was a tall, stocky man of about forty made up to look much older, with white powder sprinkled in his brown hair and lines on his face sketched a little too darkly in greasepaint.
“When do you think we’ll start, Alan? We’re all ready to go back here …”
“I know, I know. Let’s hold off a bit, shall we?”
The actor scanned the room and absorbed the lone sight of Amanda.
She gave a shy wave. “Hi.”
“I’ll inform the others,” he said worriedly.
At about five minutes before curtain time—when Alan, nearly hysterical, was threatening to hunt down a building supervisor—they heard clattering in the hall, and a nurse pushed in an ancient man in a wheelchair. He was wearing a blue hospital gown and did not appear entirely certain about his whereabouts. He seemed to be protesting something to the nurse, but his words were slurred and inaudible. The nurse, unruffled, ignored him and wheeled him to a place in the front row. An equally ancient woman followed behind with a walker. Alan gaped but didn’t move. It was Amanda who came to the nurse’s aid, helping to move a banquet chair to accommodate the wheelchair and then showing the elderly lady into a seat. More people began to enter the room: a pair of lively, white-haired women who noisily reminisced about a bus trip to Broadway to see Cats; a dapper gentleman in jacket and tie with dyed red hair slicked straight back; a sour-looking woman in bathrobe and paper slippers, who asked Alan if he had any idea “how long this damn thing was going to last”; a frail, silver-haired man, complete with Quasimodo hump, who made several attempts to pour himself a cup of coffee from the unplugged urn. Alan retreated backstage, leaving Amanda to perform usher duty. By ten past the hour, a good thirty or forty residents had filled the front seats and were looking restlessly toward the partition.
Alan returned to the room and switched on a single spotlight that had been set in the corner and trained on the center of the accordion wall. All the other lights were switched off. He walked into the spotlight and greeted the residents.
“My name is Alan Fielding, and I am the writer and director of tonight’s play, American Stigmata …”
“Speak up!” shouted the woman in the bathrobe, and the rest of the audience mumbled its assent.
“Sorry.” Alan cleared his throat and began speaking again in a slightly louder voice. “The play you will see tonight, American Stigmata, which I wrote and directed—”
“Still can’t hear you at the back!” yelled the woman in the bathrobe.
This time Alan did not pause. “IS A CHALLENGING NEW PERSPECTIVE ON WEALTH, HOMELESSNESS, AND AIDS. IT IS NOT LIKE OTHER PLAYS YOU MAY HAVE SEEN IN THAT THERE IS NO SET OR SCENERY. THE PLAY’S POWER DERIVES SOLELY FROM THE TALENT OF THE ACTORS AND THEIR ABILITY TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE IN THEM.”
“Did he say it was a musical?” Amanda overheard the man with red hair whispering to one of the Cats ladies next to him.
“Yes,” she replied. “A make-believe musical.”
“Oh good.”
“BECAUSE OF THE INTENSE NATURE OF THE PLAY, I ASK THAT YOU HOLD YOUR APPLAUSE UNTIL THE VERY END. THERE WILL BE TWO ACTS AND ONE BRIEF INTERMISSION. THANK YOU.”
The man leaned over to the woman again. “A nature play?”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “Maybe he means it’s like Lion King.”
Alan found Amanda, who had moved up several rows, and sat down beside her. His eyes searched the faces around them.
“Frieda and Neil aren’t here.”
“Who are they?”
“The people from my book club.”
The partition rolled back, exposing the other half of the reception room. Three actors and two actresses squatted in the shadows to the side of the single spotlit microphone. The actor Amanda had seen earlier stepped up to the microphone and announced, “My name is John Barrington the Third. I am a retired industrialist and father of John Barrington the Fourth.” He sat down and one of the actresses took his place at the microphone. She, too, had powdered hair and greasepaint wrinkles, but clutched a shawl around her shoulders. Amanda noticed that aside from makeup and one distinguishing accessory—the first actor had worn a bright scarlet tie—the cast members were dressed identically in black T-shirts and jeans. “I am Abigail Barrington, wife of John Barrington the Third and mother of John Barrington the Fourth.” She sat down and the next actor took her place—and so on, until the entire cast had introduced itself in some relation to John Barrington the Fourth, who came last, and whose accessory was a red lesion on his face.
“I wanted it to begin like an AA meeting,” Alan whispered, “with each person revealing their identity as if it were an addiction.”
“I guess they couldn’t afford costumes,” observed the old gentleman in front of them.
The actors then performed a series of swift tableaux, grouping and ungrouping themselves around the microphone. The son announced to his parents that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. The parents argued over the distressing news, the father expressing his horror, the mother pleading for sympathy. The son then argued with the parents, accusing them of insensitivity and blaming them for the double life he had been forced to lead as a homosexual. The other actress played an activist, who urged him to embrace his true identity as a gay man. Then, after a tableau in which the son denounced his family, the cast changed their roles. They adopted new accessories that identified them as the homeless people John Barrington the Fourth encounters on his journey through the streets. The actor who played the father now shook a cup, the mother huddled with shopping bags, the activist dipped a ladle in an imaginary soup kitchen.
Alan watched the play critically, sitting forward in his seat with his chin propped in his hands. Amanda could tell he was making notes to himself about lines he wanted to change, scenes he wished to adjust—and this fortunately had the effect of making him impervious to the mutiny gathering around him.
The bathrobe lady was the first to rebel. Barely a quarter hour had passed when she stood up and, with an exasperated sigh that even the deafest among them could not have missed, shuffled out of the room. Her behavior seemed to elicit more disapproval than agreement from the audience, most of whom were still watching the play as if they hoped that dancing lions might yet appear, except for the man in the wheelchair, who kept up his angry mumble. During the son’s confrontation with his parents, John Barrington the Fourth knocked the microphone with his elbow, and the actors had to break character for a few seconds to adjust it. Alan crept up to the performance area to ensure the microphone was solidly back in place, and the man with the hump called out, “Could you turn up the volume while you’re at it?” There was more fumbling and a few nasty electronic screeches as Alan played with the controls. The play resumed. Ten minutes later, three more residents rose to leave, more quietly—but not less visibly—than the woman in the bathrobe. The man with the dyed hair had nodded off, while the two Cats women continued to watch the play with weakening smiles.
Amanda wished she felt more indignation on Alan’s behalf, but the truth was, she was enjoying the play about as much as the residents were. The first act lasted nearly a full hour. When the lights were turned back on for intermission, only about twenty members of the audience remained. Amanda’s mind had wandered so completely that for a moment she mistook the intermission for the end of the play.
“What now?” she asked Alan.
“Coffee, I think,” he said, giving her a strange look.
As the residents milled about sipping their coffee, Amanda wondered what she should say to console Alan. He insisted on standing off to the side—out of aloofness or disappointment, Amanda couldn’t tell. She managed to cobble together a few words of reasonably plausible praise, but just as she opened her mouth to speak, one of the Cats women approached. The woman was of a type Amanda recognized from New York theater lobbies twenty-five years ago who arrived in gaggles at the Sunday matinee, pantsuited and stiff-haired, as reliable in their attendance as Catholic churchgoers in Bay Ridge, Playbills clutched under their arms in lieu of Bibles. For a moment Alan looked as if he might try to bolt, but the woman—clearly an old pro in the art of cornering—had already caught his eye and stretched out her hand while her arthritic legs struggled to keep up.
“You’re our playwright!”
“I’m afraid so.”
The woman grasped Alan’s arm to steady herself and introduced herself as Judy Mansing. Amanda saw that she had gone to a great deal of trouble to dress up for the evening, even if the outcome was not perfectly successful—she was wearing an unseasonal tweed suit and her coral lipstick had overshot her mouth by a quarter inch.
“Is this your first play?”
“No. I’ve written several.”
“Really? Good for you. I love the theater. Always used to go when I lived in New York, until my daughter moved down here, and then, when the grandchildren arrived—”
The other Cats woman joined them.
“Eleanor,” said Judy, “this is the playwright. What did you say your name was?”
“Alan,” he said. “Alan Fielding.”
“This is Mr. Fielding,” Judy said, as if her friend had not heard Alan.
“I know, I know.”
“He says he has written other plays.”
“Has he?”
“He has.”
“Fancy that.” The women looked to Amanda for the first time.
“Are you Mrs. Fielding?”
“No, I’m Amanda—Amanda Bright. I’m just a friend.”
“Oh.” Whatever conclusion Judy Mansing drew from this remark, it was not to Amanda’s advantage, for she resumed her conversation with Alan.
“You’re so young, I thought it had to be your first play.”
“Forty-three is hardly young!” Alan objected.
“It’s young to us. Thirty—forty. It all runs together.”
“Tell me, have you had any plays on Broadway?” Judy asked.
“No,” Alan said. “I think my work may be a little too—innovative—for Broadway.”
“Too what?”
“He said ‘innovative,’” Judy repeated. “We enjoyed Cats. I guess tha
t was considered innovative at the time.”
“Same with Chorus Line.”
“And West Side Story. My gosh, do you remember how none of our friends wanted to see it?”
“I adored West Side Story.”
“I think the play may be resuming,” Alan interrupted, as one of the actors began flicking the overhead lights off and on.
“It was a pleasure meeting you.”
The two women wandered away, with Eleanor guiding Judy by the arm.
“God,” said Alan in despair. “What an audience.”
“They aren’t that bad. At least they’re enthusiastic about the theater—”
“Oh really? Look.”
The women were now walking out the door. They were not the only ones. Other residents were streaming out as well, including the man in the wheelchair, pushed by his nurse. Amanda heard one person say, “I can’t last much past eight o’clock,” while another said, “I don’t know—I might have some energy left for bingo.”
By the time the partition rolled back for the second act, three members of the audience remained—Amanda, Alan, and the man with the dyed hair, snoring loudly in his chair.
Only John Barrington the Fourth pressed for the show to go on; the others began packing up the equipment. Amanda awoke the sleeping man and told him the play was over. He thanked her kindly and assured the cast that he had greatly enjoyed their “little production.”
“I’m going to the bathroom to get this makeup off,” said the actress who played Mrs. Barrington. “Anyone feel like going for a drink after? There’s a Friday’s across the street.”
Alan was trying to force a buckle closed on the microphone case. “I could use a drink. How about you, Amanda?”
Yes, she could use a drink—for sure she could use a drink—but she did not want a drink with Alan. Amanda decided right then that she did not want anything with Alan. What she wanted was to get the hell out, to bolt home, like a horse to its barn.
Amanda Bright @ Home Page 15