On the other hand, nothing could have kept Theo away from the thrill of seeing his characters incarnate, hearing their words in human flesh. Nothing, not even Scottie Smith, could kill that pleasure.
Scottie Smith was no older than his five producers and no bigger than Thayer Iddesleigh (a fact that Iddy, back home in Rome in his black silk Bob Fosse pajamas, might have been pleased to hear). But unlike the Cavendish band director, the famous Scottie Smith knew better than to emulate the styles of past great ones, and he dressed like no other director before him except possibly Sarah Bernhardt. For the Foolscap rehearsals, he wore white knee pants and a quilted black jacket as iridescent as an oil spill. He also wore red wooden clogs that sounded like slamming shutters as he skidded down the aisle toward the stage without so much as a glance in Theo’s direction, and shouted at the actors, “Good morning, you abstracts and brief chronicles of the time! Hi ho, it’s off to work we skiddle!”
But then the news from Buzzy Middendorf that Theo was not only the earl’s adviser but also Ford Rexford’s literary executor (with say in who would ever get a chance to direct any revivals of any Rexford plays) reached Smith. Suddenly, he noticed Theo seated in the empty auditorium. Having seen him, he took to waving at coffee breaks and then to inviting Professor Ryan to comment as a Renaissance scholar on textual ambiguities in Foolscap. “I’d be happy to,” said Theo, and showed up the next morning with a twenty-page list of suggestions. “Pow! Zap! What a lot!” said Smith, who tended to talk at times like a comic book and at other times like essays in Diacritics.
It had been immediately clear that Scottie Smith had no memory of Theo from that horrible (and admittedly crowded) playwriting workshop so many years ago, no memory at all of Theo’s having submitted a play anything like the one Smith now so worshipfully referred to as “Raleigh’s last testament.” He did say that from the first moment he’d read Foolscap he had felt as if he’d known the play forever, but he’d attributed that feeling to the “spine-jabbing alchemy of individuated genius and cultural familiarity that means masterpiece.” This was the way Smith talked when he wasn’t talking like Action Comics. Critics loved him. Academics loved him too, because he was always consulting them about textual accuracy, and would make half a dozen long-distance phone calls to Shakespeare scholars to decide, for instance, whether in Othello he should go with Desdemona’s saying, “Then Lord have mercy on in” as in Quarto I, or instead he should have her say, “Oh Heaven have mercy on me,” as in the Folio.
“Ah,” Theo said to Smith during one of the coffee breaks. “This is how you do it then. You do nothing to the words, and absolutely anything you want to with everything else.”
“You got it!” Smith smiled.
“But that only works with plays whose texts have the power of their canonical status.”
“That’s a lot of power.” Smith smiled. It was his claim that the text of a master (like Shakespeare or Raleigh) was inviolate, and the director’s contribution “merely conceptual”—a “merely” with which he certainly ran, setting Othello on a riverboat with Iago as the Interlocutor in a minstrel show and staging Hamlet (of which he’d allowed not a single syllable to be cut) as a saga of Nazi collaboration in Denmark with Fortinbras’s army as the Allied invasion.
As a result, Theo found himself in the bizarre position of suggesting a large cut in Foolscap, only to have the director accuse him of blasphemy. The further irony was that last year, this particular scene had been one that Theo had insisted on keeping for its thematic relevance, despite Ford’s telling him, “Lose it. It won’t play, kid.” Now, hearing the scene on the stage, Theo felt compelled to suggest to Scottie Smith that it didn’t play, only to be told by the director that it was a “crucial link in the thematic grid.”
The actress playing Elizabeth happened to be the R.S.C. star who’d been Cleopatra in Stratford the night Rexford died. (In fact, a number of times at rehearsal breaks, in Theo’s hearing, she told the story of Ford’s final night, always beautifully.) Buzzy Middendorf had talked this woman (also his client) into taking the part in Foolscap, although Elizabeth didn’t come on until Act II, and even when she did, she wasn’t quite sure what she came on as. “If this is 1618, I’ve been dead for fifteen years,” she kept telling Smith.
“Don’t be so literal,” he advised her.
“Am I a ghost or what?”
“You’re a memory, darling.”
“A flashback?”
“No, no, no. A thought.”
“I’m a thought? How do I play a thought?”
“Not so fleshily,” he suggested.
Scottie Smith and the actress were not getting along. One day, he stopped rehearsal and told her bluntly, “You’re not giving me what I want.”
“I’m giving you what you get,” the great actress, hands ominously on hip bones, shouted it into the dark theater. “What exactly is your objection?”
“That you’re playing Elizabeth with all the cynical ennui of Mother Courage in a brothel.”
“Ah. What would you know about women in a brothel?”
Smith smirked. “Don’t be bitchy.” Down the aisle he came clattering in his clogs. “I want the repression, the insecurity, as well as the ballsy power. I want sexual fear. Let’s remember why Elizabeth was called the virgin queen, can we? I know it’s a stretch for you, darling, but try to think back to whenever you were one—say, aged nine or ten?”
“That’s it!” The actress’s script flew all over the stage. It took Buzzy Middendorf two days to reconcile the two.
During the weeks of rehearsal, Smith became quite friendly with Theo and even invited him to sit in on concept-strategy sessions, as he called them. What this meant was a session where his strategy was to tell everyone else how he’d arrived at a concept, and then show them the set they’d have to build to go with it. “Everyone” did not include the actors, who were best left out of creative decisions. The director’s concept for Foolscap was not, of course, to stage it where it took place, in the Tower of London in 1617 with flashbacks to represent Raleigh’s restagings (and rewritings) of his past. Instead, Smith had wanted (as always) something hot and now. He’d toyed for a while with the notion of playing Raleigh as a type of Solzhenitsyn in a Siberian gulag. He explained why to the roomful of what he called “Foolscappers.” Four of the five producers listened to him as reverently as they did to their cassettes of New Age spiritual counseling. The fifth, Cynthia Lewis-Bristol, said periodically, “I’m not following you,” in a tone that implied she didn’t care to, either.
Smith sat on (not in) his chair at the head of the conference table: “I thought, after all,” he said, “Raleigh was an author, condemned for his ideas. The writer-as-political-dissident imprisoned, even executed, for challenging the state. It has deep contemporary resonance.” But Smith (as a great believer in the “readiness is all” or the “hot and now”) confessed that on further thought he’d seen “a grando problemo,” and had ultimately decided that the gulag was an idea whose time had come and gone. “Torturing writers has an early eighties feel to it,” he told the producers.
Cynthia Lewis-Bristol said, “I’m not following you.”
Nowadays, Smith explained, with a playwright president of Czechoslovakia, and Russian poets judging beauty contests in Moscow, and even South Africa trying to improve its PR, really, where could he set Foolscap as a prison for dissenting writers, except maybe China or Cuba?
“I don’t see Raleigh as Chinese,” said Cynthia Lewis-Bristol, a little too wryly, for one of her coproducers felt compelled to warn her with a pointed finger against (presumably) further sarcasm.
“Or Cuban, especially,” Cynthia added, undeterred.
Scottie Smith thought about this a while. “Cuba. Orinoco. Raleigh does say…what is it, about the Indians?”
Theo called from his seat off to the side, “‘I could have been King of the Indians. My name s
till lives among them.’”
Smith yanked on his spiky hair as if trying to make himself taller. “Zounds! Wowie!” he said. “I’m impressed, Dr. Ryan. How’d you get to know this play so well so fast?”
“He’s got a photogenic memory,” Buzzy Middendorf suggested.
“Dr. Ryan, what do you think of Cuba?”
“Not much.”
The director clicked his little red clogs together. “You’re right. The more I think about Cuba, the more I see Spider Woman and Evita plastered all over it.” No, Smith continued, the artist politicized was as passé as the artist problematized. Instead he was going to “interiorize the artist,” existential depression and aesthetic decadence and apocalyptic anticipation were going to turn the artist back on himself in the old fifties fashion, but new and hot. The real prison was, of course, individuation itself; the death sentence, the inescapable solipsistic center and circumference of reality was going to be…!
And here, Scottie whipped off the cloth cover from a box on the big table and revealed a scale model of a set. It looked like (with all its electric circuits and complex machinery) the inside of a space capsule. But what it was, according to Scottie Smith, was the inside of Sir Walter Raleigh’s brain.
And it was there—with all the characters who played Raleigh’s different memories color-coded to match the neurons that had sparked them off—it was there, in that brilliant Renaissance brain, that Foolscap was to take place. We would literally see Raleigh’s thoughts.
“No comments?” asked Smith, tapping his silver nose stud as he glanced around the quiet room.
Only Cynthia Lewis-Bristol had the guts to ask how the actor playing Raleigh (a very famous actor) was supposed to be inside his own brain, because the notion of this star’s doing a voice-over was not going to fly.
Smith said that Cynthia’s was a fascinating metaphysical question, wasn’t it? Perhaps we were all inside our own brains and nowhere else. Perhaps reality was only those electric synapses we called words, hm?, and images, hm?
Cynthia Lewis-Bristol said, “I’m not following you at all.”
Polo Burr had to agree with her. “But Raleigh imagines his own execution. And I think we should show it. I mean it. The ax, the head, and all. We need blood.”
Smith smiled. “‘Raleigh imagines his own execution,’ yes-indeedy-do. And where do you imagine things?” The director ran the fingers of both hands skipping quickly all over his head. “Inside the brain.”
Cynthia Lewis-Bristol said, “Then why shouldn’t the audience simply save the price of the ticket, stay home, and imagine Foolscap? Inside their brains.”
“Because they have no imaginations!” Smith leapt up and down. “They need to be zapped, pow! If they weren’t numb, it wouldn’t take Chain Saw Massacre to make them jump.”
“So the set’s a brain,” mused Polo Burr, “or rather,” (he began to get into it), “wouldn’t you say, not a brain, but a mind?”
“Good, good,” Smith patted him. “Bingo! Interiority. Believe me, it’s now. The critics will love it.” Smith did a Groucho Marx-like looping stare around the table, but failed to notice (or at least to be affected by) the look on Theo Ryan’s face. “Other comments? Oh, my dears,” the director said, “I can’t tell you how much I love working with long-dead authors. Give me Shakespeare. Give me Raleigh. You never have to listen to their bitching. God, if we had the author of Foolscap to put up with, he’d probably be having fits right now because we wouldn’t get out our hammer and nails and reproduce the boring old Tower of London for him and stick everyone in ruffs and hose. And frankly, beloveds, if we did that, we’d all go right down the loot-and-laurel drain-o.” Smith held the wide arms of his iridescent jacket out like a prophet. “And, correct me if I’m wrong, but loot and laurel is what we’re here for. We all want to be King of the Indians forever, don’t we?”
The following year, when the new decade began and Foolscap opened, the critics loved it. Scottie Smith won two awards in London for best director, and then the year after that, he won three more in New York, including the Tony.
In the playwrighting category, Sir Walter Raleigh wasn’t eligible. And, of course, neither was Theo Ryan.
Chapter 33
Exeunt All But…
Even such is Time which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust: Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days.
—Sir Walter Raleigh
Three months had passed since the discovery of Foolscap in Saint Michael’s Church, one month since the five producers had optioned it and hired Scottie Smith to direct it, and only a week since the three rival claimants to its ownership (earl, marquess, and Church) had, in the Christmas spirit, agreed to a final settlement. Rehearsals were still in progress. Theo had just returned to England to attend them. The week before, he’d flown to North Carolina to serve as best man at the wedding of Steve Weiner and Jorvelle Wakefield. From London, Jonas had sent his regrets and a Georgian sterling tea service.
The two Cavendish professors were married in Greensboro, and Maude Fletcher performed the ceremony. Neither Jorvelle’s mother nor Steve’s father looked very happy at all (and both predicted that, had their spouses been alive, they would have refused to come), but “Time, time, time,” Theo’s mother advised them cheerfully, and maybe time would help.
Maybe time would help the look in the eyes of Jane Nash-Gantz, too. For, to the professed astonishment of the international academic community, Vic Gantz had suddenly left his wife. One evening after they’d returned home from a party, he’d simply handed her his lawyer’s card, and suggested she get one of her own. “Vic?” everyone said. He had not only left her, but left their son, Nash, whom he’d raised so devotedly, and left Cavendish, which he’d served so diligently, and (apparently) was planning to marry a young woman who taught at the state college in New Jersey where he’d taken a job. “Vic?” everyone said. Not only that, he was suing Jane for alimony.
“And he charges me with mental cruelty!” Jane, stylishly dressed as ever for the Weiner-Wakefield wedding, but looking as if she had not slept in weeks, hugged Theo, lured her son away from Jorvelle’s cousins, and roared off with him to drive back to the airport. She yelled out the window of her Mercedes, “Vic told me all his life all he ever wanted to do was leave New Jersey! See what I get for arranging it?”
Also at Jorvelle and Steve’s wedding, Lorraine Page and Rhodora Potts met for the first time, and to Theo’s astonishment, the two women seemed to like each other, or at least to find endless topics to talk about together—from makeup under stage lights to the aggravatingly slow pace of Benny and Theo Ryan—during the entire flight back to New York.
After meetings there with Adolphus Mahan, with Bernie Bittermann, and with the SoHo director Barbara Sanchez, Theo flew to London over the Christmas holidays; there he learned that under the terms of their new contract, the Earl of Newbolt, the Marquess of Urswick, and the Church of England were to share equally in all profits from productions of Raleigh’s Foolscap and from the auctioning of its original manuscript. (The highest bid came from a private museum in Los Angeles where the thin vellum folio was soon to be locked in a glass case between a first edition of Raleigh’s History of the World and a lock of Milton’s hair.) By a special stipulation insisted upon by Horace Stanlow, Earl of Newbolt, and finally reluctantly agreed to by the others, Dame Winifred Throckmorton was to receive one-eighth of all those profits, since (as the earl generously pointed out) there never would have been a Raleigh play if she hadn’t been so determined to find it.
The earl’s comment was truer than he knew.
Not that Dame Winifred had ever officially said that Foolscap was a Raleigh play. In fact, the day of Theo’s return, she’d written letters to the earl, and to a number of Renaissance newsletters, and to the London Times, saying quit
e the opposite: that she did not believe the author of Foolscap was Sir Walter Raleigh, or any other Jacobean with whom she was familiar; indeed, she rather suspected that Foolscap might be a modern forgery.
Absolutely no one agreed with Dame Winifred Throckmorton. In fact, her position struck some as perverse, and others as evidence of senility, or at least a failing grasp of modern scholarly techniques. She declined to comment further on her views, just as—whenever asked about the newest attribution of the play proposed by some other academic (the Davenant theory, for example, or the Elizabeth Carey theory)—she would usually smile and say something like, “Ingenious,” or “Dear me, how very funny.”
So when, a week following her letter to the Times, she telephoned Theo in London and invited him (if he had no other plans) to spend Christmas Eve with her, the American wondered if finally she wanted to bring up openly the question of the play’s authenticity with him.
“Deny it!” commanded Jonas Marsh. “You got what you wanted. She never took an erroneous public stand.” Jonas and Mole were leaving to spend Christmas at the Fontwell family home and Theo had come over to Brown’s to see them off.
“I won’t answer a direct question with a lie,” Theo told him.
“What curious distinctions you make,” Jonas said.
“Tell her Merry Christmas.” Mole’s kind smile stayed at the window of the yellow Bentley until it turned the corner.
Foolscap Page 40