The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  I hated it. The Hamlet yipped his lines like an overexcited lap dog, caressed the air in front of his face to show philosophical confusion, and displayed a greater passion for Horatio than for Ophelia. We left at intermission.

  But I was back in the swim of things again, and feeling much better about it. Foxfire was scheduled to reopen the eighth of January. The set had been completely rebuilt in only four days, but the new electrical installations had to be approved by the city building inspector. The city was in no way obstructive; in fact, I think some red tape was cut to help us reopen as soon as possible. But it did take a little time.

  On reopening night enthusiasm was running high with the tentative hope that maybe the worst was over. Even the presence of a police guard backstage didn’t dampen the company’s spirits. Gene Ramsay’s guards would be on duty twenty-four hours a day now; the owners of the Martin Beck Theatre had threatened to break the lease unless Ramsay could guarantee the safety of their building.

  I stood in the middle of the stage admiring the new set. Stage sets get shabby fast, a fact more readily visible to the actors than to the audience. A totally new set gave us a lift when we all needed one. Maybe the worst was over.

  Tiny was on the stage setting up a chess set. I was fascinated by the sight of his fat sausage fingers flying nimbly over the board, placing each piece in its proper place. He glanced up and saw me watching him. “Nhhmumb bergernumph all over dumble mubble in the blarg.”

  I opened my eyes wide. “I didn’t know that!”

  Tiny nodded and turned back to the chess board.

  Griselda Gold had called a brushup rehearsal the day before, so the cast was ready and rarin’ to go. John Reddick had come backstage, keyed up and fidgety. Vivian Frank told me that she looked on tonight as her real debut in Foxfire and that all her earlier performances had just been rehearsals. Ian Cavanaugh was pacing, as he always did when he was up. Hugh Odell’s child-wife Rosemary was in his dressing room, and even she was aware that something special was happening.

  “I’m feelin’ good, Abby,” beamed Hugh. “I’m feeling so good, I’m going out there and win a Tony tonight.”

  I laughed. “I don’t doubt it for one minute, Hugh. Let me be the first to congratulate you.”

  “I’ve already done that,” said Rosemary.

  “It’s like opening night,” Hugh went on, “but without the tensions of wondering whether the audience will like you or not. It’s the strangest thing, but I have the feeling it’s going to be all right from now on. Do you feel that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t know what you were worrying about anyway,” Rosemary said to her husband. “It’s not you they’re after.” She realized what she’d said and shot me a quick look.

  Hugh laughed and kissed her.

  John Reddick and I found ourselves places where we wouldn’t be in Leo Gunn’s way and settled down to watch the performance. That is, I settled down; John was still fidgety. Neither one of us wanted to go out front and mingle with that curiosity-seeking crowd. I kept thinking that the omens for a good performance were so strong that something had to go wrong.

  But it didn’t. Early in the first act Vivian Frank began asserting her right to be considered an actress of the first rank. She was too smart to imitate Sylvia Markey’s interpretation of the role and thus invite unfavorable comparison. The character she was playing was a strong-minded one. Sylvia had snapped out her lines with an authority that established her as a voice to be listened to. When later in the play the character began to crumble, Sylvia’s picture of mental disintegration was all the more poignant because of the illusion of strength she had created earlier.

  Vivian went at it differently. She’d pause before certain lines, as if thinking over what she was going to say. The lines then gained weight as considered responses. In the breakdown scene in the second act, Vivian would blurt out her lines without thinking at all, as if she’d lost her normal thought processes. Two different ways of creating the same picture—both valid, both exciting.

  I was tickled pink at the way the performance was going. John Reddick and I grinned foolishly and punched each other like a couple of locker-room boys after the big game. Leo Gunn made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and beamed from ear to ear. Carla Banner and Griselda Gold and Tiny all stood as if hypnotized, entranced by what was going on on the stage.

  The audience was equally entranced. They were attentive, cough-free, and audibly responsive. Every now and then one of those little murmurs would run through the auditorium that tell performers their audience is with them. No technology will ever equal that live give and take between actor and audience. This sold-out house had been attracted as much by Foxfire’s backstage drama as by what I’d written, but they weren’t the total ghouls who’d showed up after Sylvia Markey’s disfigurement. They halfway had it in mind to lend a hand to this “bad-luck play,” and they did. The applause at the end of the first act was thunderous.

  John Reddick did a little dance and gave Vivian Frank a big hug when she came off the stage. I blew Ian Cavanaugh a kiss and told Hugh Odell his Tony was a sure thing. Rosemary wandered out of Hugh’s dressing room and wanted to know if everything had gone all right.

  I’ve never been able to cure myself of the amateurish habit of audience watching, so I peeked out between the curtains to take a look at this audience. They were talking noisily about the play, but they weren’t boisterous—the very best kind of audience to have. The worst kind of audience is the respectful one—the one whose members sit there, stony and silent, as if they were in church.

  The love-hate relationship between writer and audience is a cliché; but like all clichés, it’s based on truth. When the audience approves of what you’ve done—they’re marvelous, perceptive, intelligent people with undeniably exquisite taste. But when they’re unresponsive—they’re pig-headed, thick-skulled nobrows who judge everything by the standard of Saturday morning television. And you can have both kinds on the same day. Audiences are totally unpredictable; you never know which way they’re going to jump.

  Every audience brings its own set of prejudices into the theater. And those prejudices vary from person to person within the audience. Earlier playwrights could count on a certain unity in their audiences, a certain basis of common agreement. One simple example: Shakespeare could take it for granted that his audiences believed in God. But modern audiences hold attitudes that are diverse and conflicting, and the playwright can no longer assume that the people watching his play will see the world as he sees it. There are easier ways to make a living.

  When the second act started, the audience was ready for it. Whatever motives had brought them to the theater to begin with, it was the play, my play, that was holding them now. (Oh, all right, I’ll admit the brilliant performance the cast was giving might have made some minor contribution.) Everything went right.

  I think the entire audience must have come backstage after the performance. There was barely room to move; I found myself in the embrace of total strangers and didn’t mind a bit. High, excited voices competed with one another; everybody had something to say and they were all saying it at the same time.

  In the midst of the clamor I felt a touch on my shoulder and turned to see Tiny standing behind me. He bent down and spoke in my ear, clearly and distinctly.

  “I love this play,” he said. “I hope it runs forever.”

  I guess you can hear what you want to hear.

  12

  The newspapers and the television networks had sent reviewers to our reopening. If we’d been closed by a burst water main or something equally mundane, they wouldn’t have bothered. But the critics did come, and they liked what they saw, and they said so. What it amounted to was a third set of reviews for the play (Foxfire had been rereviewed by two of the papers when Vivian Frank first took over the leading role). Since most plays were reviewed only once, we were way ahead.

  The changes I’d made in the second act were ment
ioned favorably by those critics able to notice the difference. But most of the reviews concentrated on Vivian Frank. She was spoken of in superlatives. After years of playing supporting roles and understudying leads, Vivian had finally come into her own. A Star Is Born! One critic went so far as to say Vivian was even better in the role than Sylvia Markey had been. I didn’t agree; but just the same I was pleased with Vivian’s performance and gratified that she’d made it to true leading-lady status at last. It’s an odd feeling when it’s your play that’s the means by which a performer achieves stardom. It had never happened to me before and probably never would again. I was feeling smug and awed all at the same time.

  On a more somber level, I wondered if Jake Steiner would show the reviews to Sylvia. He probably would; the praise lavished on Vivian Frank would go a long way toward reinforcing Sylvia’s dependency. I’d made one attempt to see Sylvia since she left the hospital. The crisply efficient female voice on the telephone told me no visitors were permitted yet. I’d left my name and number without any real hope that someone would call me back.

  The weather had turned filthy. Sleet and dirt fell out of the sky on the heads of those poor souls unfortunate enough to get caught outside. I worried that playgoers might decide to keep their heads under nice dry roofs for the time being, but Foxfire continued to play to full houses. (Another sign of a hit: the cast had started grumbling about that killing eight-performances-a-week schedule.)

  The euphoria brought on by Foxfire’s new success began to fade, as such things do. We all settled down to a long run. The increased security at the theater seemed to be working; there’d been no more incidents. The police had gotten nowhere in their search for the man Sergeant Piperson had said was out to close my play. They’d learned the brand of paint splashed over the wrecked set, but that was all. So far as they could find out, the paint hadn’t been bought all in one place. Every other lead turned out to be a dead end as well. Somehow, that failed to surprise me.

  I kept going back to Sylvia Markey’s cat. It had seemed to me at the time, and still seemed so, that the beheading of the cat had only one purpose—to upset Sylvia. I didn’t see how it could be anything other than a petty act of revenge. As the vandalizing of Sylvia’s wardrobe must have been. The next act was purely malicious—putting carbolic acid in Ian Cavanaugh’s cold cream. Then the wrecking of the set—a way of causing a lot of people a lot of trouble. But there was nothing final about any of it. We would all feel bad, very bad (and very scared) for a while. But the play would go on.

  Sergeant Piperson must be wrong. These were not the acts of someone who wanted the play closed; they were the acts of someone who wanted to cause distress. Why? And why us? I had no idea. But the more I thought about it the more convinced I became that these could only be acts of vengeance for some unknown grudge, imagined or real. And perhaps whoever had done these things was satisfied now—the physical exertion required to wreck an entire stage set must alone have provided an enormous release. Almost a month had passed without anything more happening.

  Revenge as a theatrical motif from Medea onward had intrigued me for a long time. The revenge play had no place in modern theater. For one thing, it was always cast in the form of a tragedy, which proceeds on the assumption that man’s actions mean something, that they’re important enough to attract the attention of the gods—whether for good or for ill. After Darwin, we all started having a little trouble believing that.

  In the older plays the revenger was sometimes divinely chosen to exact vengeance—Apollo ordered Orestes to avenge Agamemnon’s death, the Ghost ordered Hamlet to kill Claudius. And even if no supernatural agent appeared, the revenger would still be acting out of a sense of what he thought was right and just. In some plays, such as Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, the revenger would start out with a legitimate grievance but then become so enamored with the act of revenge that he’d turn into a worse monster than those he wanted to punish. Now that was scary.

  It seemed to me that anyone seeking revenge—even today—would still have that sense of having justice on his side. He’d feel that some system of checks and balances demanded that he personally undertake to redress a wrong. This is about as close to divine commandment as we’d be able to come today, but any act of revenge must surely be backed up by some overwhelming feeling of righteousness. But a modern play would probably approach the matter as a study of a psychopath with delusions of godhood. Unless … unless the play could go at it from the opposite direction: acts of revenge as seen not by the revenger but by his victims.

  I began to make notes. Such a play could easily end up being just another outside-menace thrill-a-minute melodrama, and that certainly wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was the effect of a voice so strong and so unrelenting that it created its own authority, a voice saying you are guilty and must be punished. If we hear a thing repeated often enough and forcefully enough, we tend to believe it. Or if not actually believe it, at least lose our will to resist it. What I wanted was a picture of defenses crumbling under repeated accusations, regardless of how mistaken or how evil those accusations might be.

  A movement.

  If my usual working practices persisted, I’d discard maybe a dozen plot possibilities before settling on one I liked. I worked at it off and on for a few days, and before a week was over I found myself wrapped up in what S. N. Behrman called the warm claustrophobia of a new play.

  At such times I cannot tolerate interruptions and keep my telephone switched over to the answering service. So it was a surprise when I checked with the service on a Wednesday morning and found out Gene Ramsay wanted me to come to a meeting in his office that very day.

  It was ten o’clock. I didn’t waste any time calling to see what Ramsay wanted; he never held meetings unless they were important. I wrapped up like an Eskimo and started out. The day frowned at me, but the sleet was holding off momentarily.

  Gene Ramsay’s office was on West Forty-fourth, a fifteen-minute walk. John Reddick was stepping into the elevator just as I entered the building, so I called out to him to wait.

  On the way up I asked John, “Aren’t you rehearsing today?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but my assistant is taking it for me.”

  Uh-huh. I wondered where he’d found this one.

  The secretary in Gene Ramsay’s outer office showed us into the inner sanctum. It seemed John and I were the only ones expected.

  Gene Ramsay had one of those offices designed to intimidate the people who entered it. He sat at the far end of the room with his back to the window, behind a huge desk that effectively separated him from his “audience.” To reach his desk, you had to make a long walk down a wide aisle created by artfully arranged low tables and chairs. Like petitioners approaching the king.

  But the king had summoned us. As soon as John and I were seated, Ramsay said, “Foxfire has reached its break-even point. The backers’ investment has been repaid.”

  I gave a small cheer. This meant my percentage of the box-office receipts would go up.

  “So now,” Ramsay continued, “I think it’s time we started thinking about a touring company.”

  I’d been thinking about it since Foxfire’s successful reopening. John just nodded and said, “Never too early to start planning.”

  Ramsay assumed his power pose—body leaning forward, weight on his clenched fists on the desk, eyes fixing us as if with a pin. “I want to send out a touring company now.”

  I gaped at him. Now? With the original production not even halfway through its first season? The usual practice was to send out a touring company after a play had completed a year’s run in New York. There were several reasons for this.

  First, theater traditionally ends its season at the close of May because that’s when union contracts expire (a holdover from the days before air conditioning when the hotbox theaters couldn’t attract summer audiences). Any contracts agreed upon now would have to be renegotiated in a few months’ time.

 
; Second, it took at least a year for the title of a play to become familiar to the rest of the country. Plays opened and closed so fast in New York that only established plays had any chance of building up interest outside the city.

  Third, a well-received play might still close at the end of a year, and that meant there was a chance of signing up members of the original cast for the tour. Original casts always sold more tickets than their substitutes.

  It was John who asked the question. “But why, Gene? Why this early?”

  “Because people are talking about Foxfire now. Whoever wrecked the set bought us a lot of publicity, not to mention what happened to Sylvia Markey. It’s ghoulish but not really surprising—the great American public is curious about the play right now. We’d be fools not to take advantage of it. The booking agent has promised me a week in Cleveland starting March fifteenth if we can be ready by then.”

  “March fifteenth!” John gasped. “That’s impossible!”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Ramsay. “Check the time. When does Androcles in Church open? February the what?”

  “Fourteenth. Valentine’s Day.”

  “All right. Say you start rehearsing February fifteenth—”

  “Out of the question. You know damn well a play is never in final shape when it opens. My commitment doesn’t end on opening night.”

  “How much longer will you need?”

  “How can I tell? I don’t know what might go wrong.”

  “Guess. Name a time.”

  John pursed his lips. “At least a week. I don’t see how I can leave them in less time than that.”

  “Couldn’t your assistant take over for you?” I said sweetly.

  “He probably could, at that point. But I still want a week. At least a week.”

  “One week,” said Ramsay firmly. He checked his calendar. “That still gives you over two weeks to get ready.”

  “But it will take longer than that just to cast!” John protested.