The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  I groaned inwardly; I did indeed know Jay Berringer. Jay was a hyperactive gossip, a name dropper, and a climber. But worst of all, he was a bad actor. He came through on stage as a strong personality, which misled some people into thinking he was a strong performer. Not the same thing at all. Jay always played the same role: himself. In a role approximating his own personality, he was just fine. But any role that demanded a little inventiveness or a little perception beyond his own immediate range of experience—such a role defeated him utterly. And Claudia Knight had cast him in one of my one acts.

  “Which one is he in?”

  “Both of them. I figured as long as we had him in Pittsburgh—oh, Jay! Look who’s here.”

  “Abigail James!” Jay’s elfin face grinned from ear to ear as he hopped down from the stage and trotted up the center aisle toward me. “How good to see you again!” He gave me a quick embrace and even more quickly turned off his grin. “Claudia tells me Foxfire is in trouble.”

  Don’t you wish. “Not any more. We had a problem with the second act, but it’s straightened out now.”

  Grin on. “Good, good. I knew there was nothing to worry about. This woman,” he said to Claudia, “can fix anything. I know—I’ve seen her work.”

  “What have you been doing with yourself lately, Jay?”

  “Would you believe Arsenic and Old Lace? There are actually people who still pay money to see that turkey. I played it this summer at the Cape under an absolutely grotesque director who made me long for a Claudia Knight.” Claudia smiled; enough butter for everybody. “He kept saying, ‘I don’t want Cary Grant, I want something fresh!’ Honestly, Abby, can you see me doing Cary Grant?”

  “Honestly, no.”

  “I don’t think, he really knew what he wanted. But it’s all over now, thank goodness. Now I’m creating two new Abigail James roles, and what a relief to have good new material again!”

  “The plays aren’t exactly new, Jay.”

  “We’re treating them as if they were,” contributed Claudia. “They’re new to professional theater, at any rate. And you did make extensive changes. We’re advertising Double Play as a premiere.”

  A few minutes later Claudia started the rehearsal. The first play moved along smoothly and, alas, leadenly, Claudia interrupting the action only a few times to murmur instructions I couldn’t hear. The students in the cast looked like 1968 leftovers, all hair and rags. Two young girls Claudia had chosen were both advocates of the open-mouth school of acting. Little round faces with big round mouths saying O to portray surprise, fear, anger, dismay, you-name-it. The leading man Jayed his way around the stage, completely impervious to the meaning of his lines.

  The second play was even worse. I went to sleep.

  Watching your own play in rehearsal is an unbelievably degrading experience. Points that seemed so obvious in the writing are misunderstood or ignored. The personalities of your characters are changed before your very eyes by actors and sometimes directors who are “being creative.” Throwaway lines are turned into fanfare announcements and other lines are cut or rearranged with a wanton disregard of the structure of the scene. And you can scream and yell and damn them all to hell, but yours is only one of a multitude of screaming voices. You live in the theater; you forget there’s a world outside. You know this purgatory will never end, and then suddenly—too suddenly—it’s opening night and all you can think about are the thousand and one things that never got done.

  “Well?” Claudia sparkled into my face. “How did you like it?”

  I could have told her that she’d done some interesting things and proceeded to say, tactfully, that I thought the over-all impression was a tiny bit flat. But I’ve always resented that first-the-stroke-and-then-the-poke technique when I’ve been on the receiving end; it’s manipulative and insulting. So I told her straight off I thought the performers were lifeless and none too interesting.

  “Oh, but they’re building,” she hastened to assure me. “I’ve been pacing them very carefully. By opening night they’ll be at their peak.”

  Opening night was three nights away. At the rate this bunch was building they wouldn’t be ready until the year after next. “Could I see the script?” I asked. I took the copy Claudia handed me and went through it, pointing out places where I thought they’d missed the boat. Jay Berringer pranced up looking for compliments, saw that wasn’t what I was handing out, and did a disappearing act.

  Claudia Knight had fallen silent and her face took on a pinched look. Then she announced, “Yes, of course. I see. You’re absolutely right. We’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  The girl would go far.

  It was only four in the afternoon, but Claudia dismissed her cast because technical rehearsal was scheduled for that evening. Tech rehearsal was always a long, tedious session. It was conducted for the sole purpose of testing and fixing lighting cues, sound, set changes, costumes, and the like. In all probability cast and crew would be in the theater all night.

  Outside the sky was almost pitch black; that wasn’t at all unusual for Pittsburgh in late November. The plays were to open December 1, and the city was in full garb for Christmas. The Christmas lights were sparkling in the daytime darkness and the decorated store windows invited lingering. I stopped in a bookshop and found a copy of the one Flashman novel I hadn’t yet read.

  In the hotel room I lay on my bed thinking about the rehearsal I’d just watched. It had been pretty grim, and I wasn’t quite ready yet to figure out how much of the fault lay with the plays themselves instead of with the direction and performance. It had probably been a mistake to grant permission for the production of these early attempts at playwriting. There were parts of both plays I was still half in love with; but there were other parts that were obviously the work of a beginner. If I expected any future productions, certain things would have to be changed. Was it worth the time and effort to start from scratch and rewrite both plays completely? Or should I just forget about them and go on to my next play, whatever it was going to be?

  I would put off deciding until after opening night, waiting to see how well the plays could shape up in their present condition. Right now a little distraction would be welcome. What did Pittsburgh’s Rerun Heaven have to offer? I switched on the box and immediately switched it off again. If I hear Mary Tyler Moore say “I’m getting nauseous” one more time, I’m going to have to agree with her.

  Later on in the evening I dropped in on the technical rehearsal. A thin birdlike man sat in the duke’s seat, that one point in the auditorium where the lines of perspective from the stage converge. He had a large drawing board propped against the seat in front of him; he was calling out lighting cues to his assistants backstage. On stage, three actors stood motionless. In one sense tech rehearsals are harder on actors than on anyone else. They just get rolling in a scene when someone tells them to freeze while the director or the assistant director or the technical director checks to make sure they’re all standing in the right places as the lights are adjusted or whatever. Then the actors have to pick up the scene and go on until they’re told to freeze again. The constant checking of the stage picture is a pain in the ass, but it has to be done. Consequently there’s no such thing as momentum in a technical rehearsal. In fact, the actors don’t really rehearse at all. Tech rehearsal is wearisome and nerve-racking; everybody hates it.

  Claudia Knight sat in an aisle seat, available to the crew people streaming back and forth from backstage with questions, problems, suggestions. I liked the set for the first play; I especially liked its Gordon Craig dimensions which tended to dwarf the performers on the stage. On the whole I had no use for any stage set that dominated the action, but in this case it was wholly appropriate—the play was about man’s preoccupation with myth making as a way of convincing himself of his own importance. (I said I was very young when I wrote it.)

  The birdlike man with the drawing board chirped, and the whole stage was flooded with a strobe light. Jay Berringer crossed fr
om stage right to stage left, his body movements appearing to have that jerky quality found in the earliest motion picture films. Why a flicker light? I suspected that this particular lighting effect was used as often as not merely to justify the cost of the equipment. Sometimes a strobe made a valid contribution to a play—the ending of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, for instance. But often it was used just for show, and it looked as if that was the case here. I was almost afraid to ask.

  “It provides an external visual reflection of an inner conflict,” Claudia explained. “The character is uncertain of his values at this point in the play. His unsteady, dimly seen movement from one place on the stage to another tells the audience that change is not necessarily progress.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  After a while I got up and wandered around backstage, picking my way through the usual collection of safety hazards to be found in every theater. I stopped and looked at a prop for the second play, a storage chest that was to be heaved on stage by two straining muscle men. I could pick it up with one finger. The chest was made of cardboard and masking tape: A low budget is the mother of invention.

  “Abby, Abby, Abby! Aren’t you thrilled that Brian Simpson is coming all the way from San Francisco just to look at your plays?”

  I stared at Jay Berringer with annoyance. There are few things more off-putting than that groveling attitude toward producers so many theater people have. “I’m sure you haven’t overlooked the fact he’ll be looking at you, too,” I said.

  “I have a friend in Brian’s company,” Jay burbled, “and he says Brian’s been asking questions about me. Abby, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we both went to San Francisco? Brian Simpson has helped a lot of careers.”

  And probably killed a few, I thought, remembering an Oedipus imitating Richard Nixon’s mannerisms.

  “By the way,” Jay went on, “isn’t it just awful about Loren Keith? You know Loren, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know him.” Loren Keith was a gifted artist who had designed four or five productions for Manhattan Repertory. “Why? What about him?”

  Jay’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. “You mean you don’t know? He’s blind, Abby! Someone threw acid in his face!”

  Blind! The shock of that made me sit down, fast. “Acid in his face? You mean … on purpose?”

  “Don’t see how it could be anything else.”

  “But … what happened?”

  “Well, he’d gone to one of those superettes for some groceries, and on his way back to the car someone stepped in front of him and tossed this acid in his eyes. They don’t know who did it, or why.”

  It was too much to take in. A talented man who still had his best years ahead of him—years of shaping light and color and form. And now … “The blinding is permanent?”

  “Oh yes. From what I understand, he’s lucky to be alive.” I could see Jay’s elfin mouth twitching in the dim backstage light and it seemed to me he was getting a kind of ghoulish pleasure out of being the bearer of such sensational news. I brought myself up short; I was disturbed and I wanted to hit out and Jay just happened to be there. We still confuse the message with the messenger occasionally.

  “When did this happen, Jay? And where?”

  “Los Angeles … ah, Monday, I think. Just a day or two ago. He was working on his first movie—that new science fiction film at Universal that’s changed its title twenty or thirty times? A friend of mine has a part in the movie and he called and told me what happened.” Jay had “friends” everywhere.

  “And nobody knows who this acid-throwing freak is?”

  “The only ones who saw it happen were this couple getting out of a car parked next to Loren’s. They said it was dark and it happened so fast they never did get a look at the guy.”

  Just then a young girl appeared to tell Jay he was wanted on stage, and I made my way back to the auditorium. I didn’t even try to concentrate on what was happening on the stage. I liked Loren. He was a relaxed, confident man who knew exactly what he wanted in a design and how to go about translating it into terms of light and paint and canvas and scene projections. He was imaginative and original. And blind.

  I waited long enough to see the set for the second play and then left. A taxi took me to a newsstand that carried out-of-town papers; I got a Los Angeles Times and went back to the hotel.

  New York stage designer Loren Keith spoke with police today for the first time since being blinded in an incident Monday night in the parking lot of the Quick ’n’ Easy Food Market in the 2700 block of Ventura Blvd.

  Keith told Lt. Horton Bowles of the LAPD that the man who threw carbolic acid into his eyes had been wearing a ski mask. The only description Keith could provide of his assailant was that of a male slightly shorter than himself. The designer is six foot two inches tall.

  Keith had been working on the Universal Studios film “Beyond Antares” when the incident took place. He is listed in serious condition at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

  So the last thing Loren Keith saw in his life was the mask hiding the face of the man who blinded him. I reached for the phone and got hold of St. John’s in Santa Monica. An East Indian voice told me Loren’s condition was stable, which told me nothing at all (a corpse’s condition is “stable”). The switchboard operator said no calls were being put through to Mr. Keith and gave me the hospital’s address when I asked for it. It took an hour to compose a brief letter a nurse would have to read to Loren. What consolation can you offer an artist who’s lost his ability to see?

  5

  I’d had trouble falling asleep, and I had to force myself to get out of bed at seven the next morning. Visiting playwrights are invariably expected to address a group of eager or not-so-eager listeners at least once during their sojourn. Claudia Knight had asked me to speak to one of her classes at the drama school connected with the Three Rivers Playhouse. I was scheduled for the ungodly hour of nine o’clock that morning so as not to interfere with rehearsals.

  Some of the students, Claudia had said, had already tried their hand at writing plays as a result of taking courses in playwriting. So they would be interested in any tips I might give them. I had never taken a course in playwriting, and I didn’t have the foggiest notion what went on in such sessions. All I could tell them about were the problems I’d encountered in writing my own plays and how I’d tried to solve them.

  At the theater Claudia was waiting for me, dark circles under her eyes.

  “What time did you finish?” I asked.

  “Four-thirty,” she said. “And do you know, I don’t remember a thing that happened after two o’clock.”

  I knew the feeling. Claudia took me into a building adjoining the theater and into a classroom.

  Claudia Knight turned out to be one of those teachers who think people learn better sitting in a circle. The room was lined with students and had a big empty space in the middle. I hoped I wasn’t expected to stand there and deliver my talk, arena-style.

  I wasn’t. Claudia and I found places in the circle, and after her introduction I stood up and began to speak.

  All playwrights have their own ways of working, I said, but I always tried to avoid starting with a character, or even a group of characters, and letting the action grow out of the characters. Instead I started with some kind of movement, a going from one point to another point.

  Since this was a semi-academic situation I was in, I figured I could risk using a word like “Aristotle.” Aristotelian tragedy was long gone, of course, but the procedure Aristotle described was still the best plan of attack I’d ever found. So that was about what I tried to do: find a movement, invent a plot to demonstrate it, then develop the characters necessary to make that particular plot work. The action determines the characters, not the other way around.

  One night several years ago I’d sat with some friends watching a fireworks display. It was fun; I liked those glorious bursts of color that so quickly faded into nothing but still managed to leave an impres
sion on the retina long after they’d disappeared. All that brilliance—heralding its own extinction. Brilliance existing only in potential until it is ignited, which then flares briefly and dies. Could that be the movement of a play?

  The result was Foxfire. Foxfire is the phosphorescent glow produced by fungi on rotten wood. My play was about a woman who even in the process of disintegration gives off a brighter light than the people around her.

  I went on in this vein for another twenty minutes, drawing examples from plays I thought the students were probably familiar with. I admitted I always had trouble writing exposition. If they, as future playwrights, had the same trouble, all I could suggest was that they study the ways other writers handled the problem. I told them to look closely at the opening of Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache; it was, in my opinion, the best exposition to be found in a contemporary drama.

  The students paid polite attention all the time I was talking, some of them even taking notes. When I finished Claudia Knight asked me if I was willing to answer questions. Yes, indeed, I said.

  Then came the first question: How do you go about getting a play produced? Followed by: What percentage do you get of the box-office receipts? Is Foxfire going to be made into a movie? Is Sylvia Markey hard to work with?

  I fielded these profundities and a few more like them the best I could until Claudia Knight sort of waved her hands and announced that we had to get to rehearsal.

  The rehearsal, however, wasn’t scheduled to begin until eleven, so we had a little time to kill. Claudia took me across the street to a cafe. Over coffee she stared at her cup and said, “I want to thank you for talking to the kids the way you did—I mean, for saying the kind of thing you said. I know they were able to follow you, in spite of what you might think. Thank you for taking them seriously, for taking us all seriously.”

  Well. She’d finally found the right way to flatter me.

  I looked at her closely. Claudia was tired, really tired, with the kind of tiredness that makes your ears ring and the room go round. She kept playing nervously with her cup and saucer; she was embarrassed that her students hadn’t made a better showing.