The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  We talked a little longer before it was time for me to leave. Loren seemed to have perked up some. We’d spoken of suicide and murder and disfigurement, hardly cheering subjects. But it was the renewed possibility of finding an answer that had revived him; knowing why can make a lot of intolerable things tolerable.

  About halfway back to the airport the air conditioning in the car stopped working. I rolled down the window to keep from being baked alive, and within ten minutes my sinuses were clogged and my eyes were smarting. No wonder Hugh Odell had had to abandon a movie here. By the time I reached the airport my eyes were watering so badly I could hardly see. I gave Mr. Hertz his car back and walked the three hundred miles to the terminal where I’d catch my two-thirty flight to San Francisco.

  Look for a middle-aged fag, Loren had said. In spite of Loren’s suggestion that our persecutor could simply be someone who knew us all, I still felt that Michael Crown’s unknown lover was connected with Foxfire. As Lieutenant Goodlow had pointed out, he’d have to be free to move around backstage without attracting attention. Which meant that Michael Crown’s lover was someone I knew and had probably known for a long time. Look for a middle-aged fag.

  The only middle-aged fag in the Foxfire company was Leo Gunn.

  7

  I spent the short flight to San Francisco thinking of Leo Gunn. Leo, whom I’d known all my professional life and whom I’d grown to trust like a brother. Everyone who knew Leo knew he was gay; he’d never tried to hide it. Whatever problems his homosexuality caused him, Leo kept them to himself. No one ever thought about it—the man’s sex life was his own business. Only now maybe it was our business too.

  But I couldn’t believe it. Not for a minute. Leo was a good man—honest and fair and decent. He was comfortable with himself and with other people. He was the calmest homosexual I’d ever met. He could no more kill another human being than I could. And the thought of his throwing acid in Loren’s face—no, it was just impossible.

  Besides, Leo was no actor. He’d never been an actor and he’d never wanted to be. The man Loren and John Reddick had seen was acting the role of a stranger. Leo couldn’t do that; he just wouldn’t know how.

  Unless all those years of watching from backstage had taught him a hell of a lot about acting.

  No, that was absurd. The whole thing was absurd. Leo Gunn was not a destructive man. He would never do these horrible things. Never.

  Foxfire had a cast of eleven people; other than Ian Cavanaugh and Hugh Odell, only two of them were men over forty. Neither was homosexual, I was sure. There was one actor in the Foxfire cast that I knew was gay. But he was in his late twenties, far too young to have been Michael Crown’s lover. He was out.

  Gene Ramsay? Definitely not homosexual. Stagehands, front-of-house workers? I didn’t have any reason to think so.

  Leo Gunn, Leo Gunn, Leo Gunn.

  No. I couldn’t accept it.

  Brian Simpson had sent a gofer to meet me at the airport. Her name was Sandy Keegan and she was Simpson’s production assistant. Sandy was in her thirties, California-blond, and one of those women usually described as perky. I’d met her once before, briefly; she’d been the one Brian Simpson had sent to Pittsburgh to see Claudia Knight’s production of Double Play.

  “I hope you don’t mind going straight to the theater,” she said. “We can get you settled in a hotel later. Brian’s been tied up in conferences all day and he wants you to join him as soon as you can.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  I waited at the terminal entrance with my one bag and my attaché case while Sandy went for her car. Now that I was actually here, I was looking forward to meeting Brian Simpson again even less than before. It had been several years since I last saw him, and I wondered if he’d changed any.

  Brian Simpson and I had got off on the wrong foot at our very first meeting and it had been downhill ever since. Simpson had been touring his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I happened to be in Philadelphia visiting friends after my first play had closed, so I decided a little cheerful Shakespeare was just what I needed.

  Mistake.

  Simpson turned out to be an advocate of the pop theory that Shakespeare was a “cruel” writer, that all his plays have a dark, sexual undertone that puts them right in step with the disillusioned, violent black comedy of modern times. Even so life-affirming a play as A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not immune to this “approach.” Simpson’s production began with the cast dragging dead bodies off the stage—plague victims, you know. This was to help set the proper dark tone of the performance. Simpson’s program notes mentioned the fact that A Midsummer Night’s Dream had not been performed in the Globe Theatre when it was first produced in 1595. He went on to say the probable reason for this was the presence of plague in London that year, which most likely closed the public theaters and sent the acting companies to safer places in the country. All of which was by way of justifying starting the play with the removal of plague victims from the stage. Very ingenious.

  When I met Simpson after the performance, however, I suggested that the true reason the play hadn’t been performed in the Globe Theatre in 1595 was that the Globe hadn’t been built yet. It opened its doors in 1599, four years after the first production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  That didn’t go down too well. Simpson huffed and blustered and dismissed the whole thing as unimportant. He was not a man to allow fact to interfere with his “concept.”

  Thus my reluctance to entrust my two flawed one-acts to Simpson’s directorial eccentricities. Besides, I felt sure the only reason he wanted to do Double Play in the first place was that Foxfire had been in the news so much lately—Simpson knew the value of publicity. But I had a seven-day option to withdraw permission for production; I’d insisted on that escape clause in my agreement with Simpson.

  Sandy pulled up to the terminal entrance and we drove into town. Along the way I learned she’d been with Brian Simpson for eleven years. “Ever since I left Berkeley,” she said proudly.

  “Exactly what is it that you do?”

  “I participate in the decision making—the selection of plays, casting, determining production concepts. Some fund raising, though Brian does most of that himself.”

  If there was one thing Brian Simpson was gifted at, it was getting money out of people. He’d managed to persuade several affluent foundations that the only true experimental work in American theater today was being done in his theater. The theater itself had been built by funds provided by an oil magnate’s wife whom Simpson had courted financially for over a year. He repaid her by accepting speaking engagements in which he made jokes about California matrons who wanted theaters named after them.

  The theater was serene-looking from the outside, but inside was chaos. Sandy led me on a roundabout route that took us across the stage. A new set was being erected, but no one seemed to know what it was supposed to look like. There was a lot of shrieking back and forth.

  Sandy just laughed at the confusion. “We’re all crazy here,” she said happily. Claiming to be crazy always seems more glamorous than admitting one is merely disorganized.

  Behind the stage area Sandy stuck her head through a doorway, said, “Here she is!” and stepped back to let me go in. Brian Simpson sat at a table with two other people in a small conference room. He looked exactly the same—tall and thin, his bald crown gleaming above the fringe of hair that reached his shoulders. He erupted from his chair, took one of my hands in both of his, and gazed sincerely into my eyes.

  “I knew that someday we’d create something together,” he said, “and now that day has come. Welcome, Abigail James, to Brian Simpson’s theater.”

  Oh, yes, he sometimes spoke of himself in the third person. The two people he’d been talking to were quickly introduced and even more quickly dismissed.

  “Sandy, dear, see if you can find the boys. Try the green room.” Sandy hurried off on her errand. “Now that we’re alone,” Simpson said to me,
“I want to know everything there is to know about what’s been happening to Foxfire.”

  “In twenty-five words or less?” I sighed. “Even the police don’t know everything there is to know, and I certainly don’t.”

  “You must have some idea why your play has attracted so much malice.”

  “What a charming way of putting it.”

  Simpson leaned back and looked at me speculatively. “You’re writing a play about it, aren’t you?”

  That made me uncomfortable. I was doing just that. I wasn’t writing about the specific events in Foxfire’s beleaguered history. The Foxfire experience would have to be sea-changed into something I hoped would turn out to be rich and strange. But I still wasn’t ready to talk about The New Play yet.

  Simpson gave me a knowing look. “I respect your reticence, Abby. I understand the creative process—I live with it every day of my life. Those of us born to create are slaves to our passion.”

  I worked at keeping my face straight.

  “So if you don’t want to talk about it, I certainly won’t press you.” Simpson lowered his voice and spoke confidentially. “But I do have a reason for asking. Every few years I need to stimulate my nerve ends, get away from the familiar. Do a play outside San Francisco once in a while. I thought I’d try the East Coast next year.”

  So that was the reason I was in San Francisco. Brian Simpson wanted to direct a play in New York.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve already promised it to John Reddick.”

  Simpson lifted one eyebrow. “The little man who isn’t there?”

  “He’ll be back,” I said shortly.

  “But if he isn’t …?”

  “He’ll be back.”

  Just then Sandy came in with “the boys” Simpson had sent her to find. “The boys” were about thirty, and they were holding hands. They could have been twins—they were both modishly thin, they both had Brillo hairdos, and they both wore the blue jeans uniform. But there were differences, too. One wore glasses, the other didn’t; one was an assistant director, the other was a designer; one was Simon, the other was called Peter. They stared at me humorlessly.

  “I’d like to start off,” Simpson said as the others took seats around the table, “with Abby telling us in her own words what her concept of Double Play is. What she hopes the two one-acts to achieve, what she felt when she wrote them, what she wants the people to feel.” (Simpson never said “audience”; they were always “the people.”) “Will you do that, Abby? In your own words.”

  Who else’s words would I use? “The first play,” I said carefully, “is about myth making. The second is about this country’s emergence as a nation of thieves.”

  They all looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to go on.

  “That’s all,” I said. “The plays are not meant to liberate anybody or to expand anyone’s consciousness or the like. They’re meant simply to make more visible two aspects of American life that concern me.”

  There was a silence. A long silence.

  Finally Simon (or Peter) spoke: “Gestalt for gestalt’s sake—I see, I see. Intriguing.”

  “Behaviorism as life style?” asked Peter (or Simon). “I think we’ve got a very real possibility there, yes, very real indeed.”

  “If we proceed with caution,” said Simpson. “We’re getting into a gray area where an antiseptic, homogenized middle-America euphoria rules. Revolution is no longer relevant. We’ll need a new attack metaphor, something to assert the value of nihilistic experiment.”

  “Something that strikes at the very heart of tribal ritual,” nodded Sandy.

  By now my mouth was hanging open, but I shut it firmly and kept it shut. A writer who’d worked with Simpson a couple of times had once told me that Simpson and his minions rarely remembered all the nonsense they spouted during the early planning stages of a production. The trick was not to remind them of what they’d said. The writer’s advice had been to say as little as possible the first couple of days, to let Simpson use up all his clichés, run out of steam. Then step in with suggestions.

  “The second play offers marvelous lighting opportunities,” said Simon/Peter. “I thought we’d light one side of the stage in red, the other in blue. A total juxtaposition of our pioneering sensibilities. Stage left—the red side—kinetic, demanding. Rebounding from the blue—the sobering influence, the counterbalance necessary to all dynamics.”

  “Intriguing,” said Simpson.

  “And then when the last line of the second play is spoken, we bathe the entire stage in a harsh, white light—Brechtian light, department store lighting. We remind the people that what they’ve been watching is not so-called real life at all, but a play—realer than real. It’ll work not just for the second play, but for the entire theater evening. Red, white, and blue light—a way of shocking the people into a negativistic consciousness. Remember the white light is to be after the last line is spoken.”

  The other three were all nodding agreement.

  “Of course,” said Simon/Peter, “this will put an extra burden on Brian. It’s the director who has to teach the performers the difference between extraverbal methodologies such as rhythm and gesture and the subverbal metaphor of the text.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Simpson said firmly. “Brian Simpson is not afraid of a challenge.”

  “Peter, it’s brilliant,” breathed Sandy. (Aha! Peter.)

  Peter smiled modestly. “It’s just an idea.”

  “Cast men in the women’s parts and women in the men’s parts,” suggested Sandy.

  “No,” said Simpson. “We did that two years ago. With Tartuffe.”

  “You cast a woman as Tartuffe?” I couldn’t help saying.

  “Or costume the characters in the thieves play as animals. Wolves and lambs.”

  I cleared my throat. “Speaking of casting. You know Jay Berringer played the lead in both plays in the Pittsburgh production.”

  Sandy and the boys exchanged glances and looked to Simpson. He put on a kindly-grandfather expression and spoke to me as if I were a child. “Abby, please try to understand what I’m going to tell you. We’ve all talked it over very carefully and we’re agreed we don’t think Berringer is right for these plays. I know Jay Berringer is one of your favorite actors, but all along I was afraid he didn’t have the soul these plays require in an actor. He has technique, I’ll say that for him, but sometimes technical proficiency just isn’t enough. I sent Sandy to Pittsburgh to get her opinion, and she agrees with me.”

  Sandy nodded. “He doesn’t have the soul for these plays,” she announced as if Simpson hadn’t just said the same thing.

  “Trust me,” Simpson said. “I have a right instinct in these matters. Berringer just doesn’t belong in Double Play.”

  “Well, if you’re sure …”

  “I’m sure, Abby.”

  I yielded gracefully.

  It went on like that for another hour. My attention began to wander. If they didn’t start talking sense soon, I’d withdraw the plays. It had been a long day and I was tired. Simpson and company were still at it when I excused myself and called a cab to take me to the hotel. I ordered dinner sent to my room; I’d leave Fisherman’s Wharf for tomorrow when I might be in a more touristy mood.

  I worked on The New Play a little and went to bed.

  The next day Brian and his bunch were a little more subdued. They were all tired, for one thing, and for another half their attention was on the current production they were trying to mount. Subdued they may have been, but daunted—never. We were deep in a serious discussion of whether the cast of one of the plays (I forget which one) should perform blindfolded or not, when a young woman appeared in the doorway.

  “Excuse me, are you Abigail James?” she asked. “You’re wanted on the phone. New York.” I remembered the last time I’d been summoned to the phone in a strange theater. Then it had been John Reddick, telling me Sylvia Markey’s face had been destroyed.

  This time it w
as Lieutenant Goodlow. “It’s bad news, Ms James. Are you sitting down?”

  “Yes,” I said, rising.

  “Your place was broken into yesterday and vandalized. I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m afraid everything has been destroyed.”

  My ears started to ring. “My papers and books?”

  There was a pause. “Everything.” I didn’t answer for so long that Lieutenant Goodlow said, “Ms James?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry. There’s nothing left. Same sort of thing that was done to the Foxfire set—ripping and breaking and paint thrown everywhere. There’s nothing left that you can use again. Your furniture—”

  “I don’t care about the furniture,” I interrupted. “My notebooks? The file cabinets? Surely all my books—”

  “All of them, Ms James. Try to prepare yourself for what you’re going to find. You can’t even see the floor, there’s so much paper everywhere. Pages ripped out, paint over everything—there’s no place to walk. He’s hit you where it hurts, and I’m sorry as hell.” I don’t remember what I said to that, but then Lieutenant Goodlow was talking again. “I want you to get the first flight back here that you can. Call me back when you have your flight number and I’ll see that someone meets your plane. Will you do that?”

  I told him I would and hung up. Something warned me not to let the news through to myself yet, to stave it off for a while. Zombielike I went back to the conference room looking for Brian Simpson, couldn’t find him, returned to the office, wrote him a note, called the airport, called Lieutenant Goodlow, called a cab.

  In my hotel room the first thing I did was check to make sure The New Play was still there.

  8

  Even Lieutenant Goodlow’s cautionary words hadn’t prepared me for the havoc that awaited.

  I’d had to take an overnight flight back; and of all the people Lieutenant Goodlow could have sent to meet me, it was Leo Gunn who was waiting at Kennedy. I’d hesitated when I saw him, but Leo, God bless him, came straight to me and gave me a warm hug. He muttered something of a consoling nature and steered me to a cab. On the way into Manhattan, I tried to find out more about what had happened.