Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  People look East and sing today.

  Love the Star is on the way.

  Dame Winifred raised her claret to Theo. “To Foolscap,” she said.

  “To Walter Raleigh.”

  “It is, in fact, a better play than I think Sir Walter would have written.”

  “Oh—”

  “I don’t mean it’s as good as other things he wrote. I’m sorry, I don’t think it is.”

  Theo smiled at her and poured her another glass of wine.

  “I meant, Theodore, he was not a playwright by nature. His genius flew about blowing trumpets a bit more bombastically than suits a play. Even a play so—shrewdly—full of self. You caught it wonderfully, that exasperating selfishness kicking up a fuss in so generous and brave a soul. I will tell you something else, too. There’s a line at the end when he’s imagining the death so soon to come. I think perhaps that is what I hate most to lose as truly Raleigh’s, for its faith gave me comfort. It made me feel—oddly, in a way his own remarks hadn’t—that his piety on the scaffold was not just another great performance. It made me feel the author really did die quite graced with faith.”

  “I hope so, too,” Theo said, and quoted the lines he knew she meant, the final one added by Ford.

  Shut tight the book. For now night calls. And soon

  Destiny on a sharp wind will sail me safely home.

  “Yes,” the old scholar said. “‘Will sail me safely home.’” She pointed her finger at him. “You are a good playwright, Theodore Ryan.”

  The American shook his head. “I had the best playwright I know in the world to help me.”

  “You mean your study of Shakespeare, of course.”

  Theo smiled.

  Epilogue

  One April night exactly three years after that faculty meeting at which he’d been thinking of endings to other people’s plays, Theodore Ryan, now full professor of English at Cavendish University, co-director of the Spitz Center, and curator of its Winifred Throckmorton Memorial Library of Theater Arts, stood in the wings of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. He stood there with Rhodora Potts, waiting with her for her cue to go on in the first show. Around them, performers moved about deftly in the vast, bustling backstage space. Autograph seekers hovered near their favorite stars. Troops of clog dancers in short flounced polka-dotted skirts whispered together as they casually stretched their legs behind their backs. In fringe and satin colors, lanky singers chatted with their relatives and fiddled with their guitar frets.

  Theo looked at all of them with affection.

  “Darlin’, you mind watching from here?” Rhodora held on to his shoulder as she checked the high thin heel of her glittering shoe.

  “Me?” He smiled. “I’ve been backstage since I was born. I’m a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.”

  “You love the craziness,” Rhodora said. “Nobody made you go to all those rehearsals last fall.” (She meant rehearsals of the original production of Principles of Aesthetic Distance staged by Barbara Sanchez, the other codirector of the Spitz Center.) “Nobody makes you fly to London every time there’s a cast change in Foolscap.”

  “It’s business,” Theo said. “One-eighth of the profits of Foolscap go straight into Dame Winifred’s memorial library. I have a practical stake in its outcome. And you get the royalties on Aesthetic Distance.”

  “Don’t kid me. You love the craziness.” Rhodora took his arm and they walked toward the front of the wings, to the edge of the side curtains.

  Theo waved at her lead guitarist—one of the musicians who’d replaced the Dead Indians. “Okay,” he said. “I love the craziness. But second show, okay if I hide in the dressing room and work? I promised Buzzy a revised last act by next week.”

  Rhodora nodded, stroking his arm, but peering past him at the show onstage. She looked pale against the red folds of the great swagged curtains and her bare shoulders were shivering. “You sure my eyeliner’s all right?” she asked, and tilted her chin up at him, turning her head from side to side.

  “I’m sure. Hold still.” Leaning over, he brushed her black shining hair from one ear so the silver spray of earring showed.

  “You think?” She patted her earring. He nodded yes, and her eyes, wild and intent, skittered avidly back to the stage where a male star was finishing his song. Deep in her throat, she began a quiet low humming.

  Theo cupped his palms over the rounded curves of her shoulders. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Scared,” she whispered, and leaned her head down, brushing her cheek against his fingers. “But I’ll be okay. Soon as I can get out there, I’ll be fine.” Bending, she ran both her hands from ankle to thigh, smoothing the length of black silk hose.

  Applause rumbled toward the stage from the dark amphitheater. A harmonizing family bowed and waved as they left the stage. The red digital seconds clicked forward on the clocks that directed each night’s double show at the Opry with a ruthless precision cleverly disguised as easygoing, neighborly happenstance. A man read an ad for headache powders. Then there was more applause.

  Then the star called Rhodora’s name.

  “Break a leg,” Theo whispered; he’d been saying it all his life.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  He kissed the back of her neck and let her go.

  Smiling, Rhodora stepped forward, taking the microphone smoothly from the man who held it out to her; with long quick strides, she walked into the center of the heat of the lights and opened her arms. And Theo thought, Amazing. She says she’ll stop being scared as soon as she can get out there face-to-face with a colossal arena of strangers, where cameras flash and the arms of fans reach out of the darkness, where four thousand people she can’t see sit waiting for her to make them feel something. Willing to love her if she can do it.

  Rhodora threw back her head, shaking loose the long black hair, and then she leaned into the darkness and sang the first notes of the song that had won her her first record award. Back at her came a whistling roar of applause and the fast sparkle of flashbulbs like stars shooting across the southern sky outside.

  Oh Lord, thought Theo Ryan, his chest lifting with the swell of his heart. Theater people…

  Then smiling, he shook his head, shrugged, and told himself, I’ll never be one of them and I always knew it. Just give me my theater on the page, just give me my books and my library. Give me, the professor grinned to himself, my scallop shell of quiet. Standing backstage while Rhodora sang her song, Theo began to chuckle. Be careful what you ask; the world may answer yes. The world had left him alone. Here he was, with (in a sense) two hit plays running tonight—Principles of Aesthetic Distance on Broadway, Foolscap in the West End—and if he’d wanted to see either one, he would have had to buy a ticket from a scalper.

  All right, that was an exaggeration. Undoubtedly, he could have pulled strings as Ford Rexford’s literary executor (or as the author of the critically acclaimed, rexford, Volume I: Preacher’s Boy) and gotten in any night to see Aesthetic Distance. And he could have phoned London as curator of the Winifred Throckmorton Memorial Library of Theater Arts and arranged for at least a single house seat to that controversial drama, Foolscap. But still, as far as the world knew, neither one of these plays was his play; he was not named as author or coauthor, and certainly not as forger, on any marquee, program, poster, paperback, audio cassette, sweatshirt, review, or ad for either of them. He was as anonymous as an artisan who’d stained the glass or carved the stone of medieval cathedrals.

  Theo thought back to how he’d waited in crowds at the previews of both those plays, handing his ticket to the usher, taking his place in the theater, and watching each show with no one on the stage and no one in the audience knowing how large a role he had played in bringing them together. And each night’s performance of Foolscap was just the next in the succession of collaborations that had begun with h
im and Ford Rexford and had gone on to include Jonas Marsh and Mole Fontwell, Dame Winifred Throckmorton, and the actors, audience, producers, designers, and, yes, the director Scottie Smith, and—among many other coauthors—Sir Walter Raleigh himself. All of them authoring changes up to the curtain’s rising on opening night, and at every performance after that, authoring more change.

  It tickled Theo to think of Shakespeare scholars hunched over their critical microscopes for centuries, deciding which scenes, which lines, which words belonged to the Bard and which should be assigned to lower talents, to bad quartos, or careless printers. But, in fact, who knew how many people had added their say as the plays made their way from page to stage, from stage to sacred text? Just think how many had already collaborated on Foolscap in its short history. Think how many would help before this new play of his, From the Wings, reached the audience it was made for.

  The theater professor looked around the wings. He smiled at a man with blacked-out teeth in patched hat and baggy overalls who was entertaining stagehands with his antics as he waited for his cue to go on. Theo smiled at a drummer in a pink tuxedo who slapped his wire whisk against his wrist as he waited to go on; at a cowboy in high-heeled boots who sewed a tear in his alligator jacket as he waited to go on; at two women in strapless gold lamé (their hair huge sprayed cascades of frosted curls) tapping their stiletto heels and waiting their cue to go on.

  Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, Theo looked around at all these singers and dancers and clowns who stood here in the wings, all with gifts they wanted to offer strangers. And as he watched them, the troupe of performers grew into a crowd, filling the dark space between curtains and dressing rooms. Leaning against the walls and flats and props, perched on ladders and light boards, a great motley host of performers collected, whispering with one another but all watching the stage, too, waiting their turn. In the shadows, Theo could imagine seeing mingled together the unwanted Dead Indians and the medieval minstrels of Urswick Castle and Thayer Iddesleigh’s chorus line of Hot Box girls with their ratty minks. Off in a corner, he could see Uncle Wally doing card tricks and Buster McBride practicing jokes with his dummy, the Latin lover Fernando-Teeno. Beside the shy ventriloquist, he could see Tara Bridges pressing her fingers against her throat where the notes of “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” waited to be sung. Like them, all over the world tonight, in theaters of every shape and size and style and measure of success, performers were waiting to go on, just as they had been for thousands of years.

  In the crowd, he saw actors waiting to take on the roles of Antony and Cleopatra, of Sky Masterson and Sergeant Sarah Brown. There, whispering together, was the cast of Principles of Aesthetic Distance. And here was Sir Walter Raleigh, glittering silver and black, pearls and diamonds, with the cast of Foolscap. The wings of the Opry crowded with more and more players: masked actors in white Greek robes, dancers in Chinese brocades with fans in each hand, Richard Burbage, Maria Callas, curled courtiers in French pantaloons, a burlesque stripper, a beatnik poet, a vaudeville juggler, Edwin Booth and Ellen Terry and Ethel Merman, drawing-room lovers with slicked-back hair, and villains with waxy mustaches. All here in the crowd.

  And among all these players, Theo saw Ford. The playwright was leaning into his opened black army trunk, pulling person after person out of it, an endless procession of characters emerging from the small trunk like a circus trick. Out of the trunk came Miss Rachel, came the preacher’s boy, came the Mexican family in Valley of the Shadow, and the husband and wife in Desert Slow Dance. And all the hundreds of others. More and more people, lifted by Ford from his small black trunk, running to join the rest. Then Ford closed the trunk, leapt on top of it, and, smiling at Theo, bowed to him, a beautiful, grand, Elizabethan bow.

  Out from the wings, Theo saw his father, Benny Ryan, slide tantalizingly onto a stage with his arms outflung, offering himself, a dream come true. And the young girls shrieked like Maenads the incantation of his name.

  He saw his mother, Lorraine Page, beautiful, young, and safe in the light, talking to darkness from a summer-stock stage.

  There in shadows of the wings, Theo saw his parents’ friends: Sweets, the former child star, and Catherine, the former soaps star; all the former stars, now forgotten, and all the company of players who were never to be stars, all of them banded together waiting to go act out life so that people seeing their show could learn—or remember—how life feels.

  The players bowed all together there in the shadows of the wings. Theo shouted and whistled as loudly as he could, and the heavy red swirls of curtain slowly closed between his wife, Rhodora, on stage, and the sharp echoing sound of strangers applauding out there in the dark.

  About the Author

  Michael Malone is the author of ten novels, a collection of short stories, and two works of nonfiction. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he is now a professor in Theater Studies at Duke University. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife.

  Reading group guide

  Many faculty members at Cavendish are referred to by the subject they teach, with or without an actual name. What does this identification method suggest about personal identity and inter-personal relationships in academia?

  Upon meeting Ford Rexford and experiencing firsthand his debauchery and immaturity, Theo expresses disbelief that the man is in fact the author of many incredibly profound plays. Have you ever met someone who completely defied your expectations given what you already knew, or discovered something about a person that seemed incompatible with your first impression? How do you reconcile the two?

  Dean Tupper resents many of the contemporary teaching methods and courses at Cavendish and reflects fondly upon his more traditional and conservative college experience. Do you have any sympathy for Dean Tupper? If you had ultimate authority at Cavendish, what would you do regarding Tupper’s employment and power?

  Theo struggles with writing Ford’s biography partly because neither he nor Ford knows for certain which events are true and which are made-up stories or mistaken memories. How do our memories change over time? Do you think any biography can be completely accurate?

  Why do you think Theo isolates himself so much from his parents? Do you think his relationship with his parents is typical of children with relatively famous parents?

  Is it fair for Ford to try to publish Theo’s play without Theo’s knowledge or consent?

  Theo’s emotions toward Ford include admiration, frustration, sympathy, anger, and love. Do you think Theo’s varying, inconsistent attitudes regarding Ford are more the result of Ford’s character and lifestyle, or Theo’s researching the man and his life so closely? What kinds of risks do biographers run when investing so much time and effort into another person’s life story?

  Theo explains that Ford considered his plays “alternatives to reality” and believed that though he could not cope with the past, he could change it through re-creation in his work (p. 299). What do you think about this method of dealing with the past? How might the reader or audience member fit into this idea of plays as alternatives to reality?

  As Ford and Theo discuss women on the way to rehearsal the last night they see each other, Ford states that Maude Fletcher is not “the one” for Theo, but, he says, “We both know who the one is, right?” (p. 122). Do you think Ford was referring to Rhodora then? If so, how did he know? Do you think Rhodora had romantic feelings for Theo at that point, or did they only develop after Ford’s death?

  Jenny Harte explains that she ran away with Ford because she was always a good kid and wanted to do something wild, irresponsible, and unplanned. Have you ever felt like Jenny? What was your wild, irresponsible, or unplanned act?

  The ghost of Ford tells Theo, “It’s like art, kid. It’s like me. It doesn’t have to be real. It just has to be true” (p. 344). What do you think Ford means by this? Is he
right? What is the difference between something that is real and something that is true?

  While discussing a scene in Foolscap, Theo observes that he originally felt the same way Scottie Smith does about the scene, but now objects to it like Ford originally did. What is the main difference between Theo’s original opinion and his later opinion? How have Theo’s experiences with Ford affected his interpretation and valuation of different scenes in theater?

  Jonas Marsh states, “Forging artists can never own their art” (p. 269). How does Theo deal with the inability to ever direct or take credit for Foolscap? Do you think you’d be able to pass up the fame that comes with being the creator of an award-winning masterpiece?

  What do you think the book’s subtitle, The Stages of Love, means?

  Ford is a great example of the traditional image of a writer as a solitary genius. Theo, however, marvels at the wide variety of people who contribute to the creation of a great work, including authors, editors, actors, directors, producers, audience members, and others. Do you typically think of a creative work as the product of one inspired, isolated individual, or the result of collaboration between many different people? How do you view the role of reader or audience member?